Finished my distance field font renderer and I though that others might be interested in this if they only knew just how useful it is.
If you start with a normal bitmap font text rendered it's very simple to convert it to a distance field font render system. I can highly recommended the
angle font generator for a simple normal bitmap font rendererd. Then apply the
bitsquad distance field tool to generate a distance field texture from it.
But part of the nice thing with a distance field is that you dont have to render simple monochrome fonts. Because the font contains the distance to the font outline you can have some fun with it. Like adding a outline, drop shadow or bluring the font in just a line of shader code or two.
Valves original paper has the shader code for all of them.
An example of this is
In the original unscaled image the letters in that image is about 200 pixels height each and making them larger has only a small effect on the quality. The font used covers most ascii chars but fits in a 256x256 texture with only one component. The effect used is a drop shadow but adjusted to affect the inside of the characters.
