Try different SDF granularities
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- C++
- Stars
- 248
- Forks
- 67
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Description
We can get better compression ratios by reducing the granularity of the SDFs -- the following commit rounds each value to the nearest multiple of 8:
https://github.com/mapbox/fontserver/commit/c213c12cf1ff45b5de9f17f8818352e344e33285
Visually it's hard to see much difference once rendered and here is the space saving for a 0-255 range:
```
master 43124 bytes
compress-more 23208 bytes
```
This is a nice boost we can get now roughly for free since it doesn't affect the format/integrating projects -- later we may try other encodings for the bitmap (PNG, etc.) but those will be format-breaking.
### Next actions
- [x] Try this and other settings (4 and 2? 16 is where I started to see artifacts...) with a variety of different fonts
- [ ] This could be variable/env based so if you want a very high quality SDF you can set your settings that way
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by comparing the referenced compression commit with the current SDF generation path, then try granularities of 4, 8, and 2 across several fonts. Define an environment or variable-based quality setting without changing the format, and verify the resulting compression savings and visual artifacts.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp
- Domain
- computer-graphics, performance
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100