Lately, I've been chipping away at the monolith that is text handling. Over the last few days I've written a C library that sits on top of FreeType and processes ranges or arrays of glyphs into images, with the option of generating simple bitmaps, single and multi-channel signed distance fields (Chlumsky's 2015 thesis) and normal maps, as well as packing them all into a convenient set of atlases.

There are still a few areas I need to improve upon, such as cleaning up self-intersecting outlines and ideally I'd like to rework the bezier curve distance function - currently I decompose bezier curves into a number of linear segments as much of the maths behind bezier curves is somewhat beyond me (I stopped studying maths at 16, please send help).

If anyone's interested in making use of this I'll release the code in a short while, once I've had a chance to tidy it up, and you're free to use it as you like / fix my bugs and terrible maths.

Old London, ASCII, 256 x 256

Futura, Extended ASCII, 512 x 512