Re: new release?

[Alexei Podtelezhnikov]

Hi Werner,
> > I am a bit concerned with 16-bit SDF. It comes in *whatever*
> > platform endianness.  It is probably an overkill and 8-bits would
> > work just fine because the distance does not have to be expressed in
> > "pixels".  For example, it can be scaled to signed [-128,127] with 0
> > threshold, or unsigned [0,255] with an arbitrary threshold.  We did
> > not have a good discussion on this.
>
> I have no opinion on that.  If you think this should be further
> discussed I suggest that you do it now :-)  On the other hand, I
> think there *was* some discussion regarding 8bit vs 16bit.  Have you
> looked up the freetype-devel mailing list archive?  I seem to remember
> that there were good reasons for 16bit.

We discussed the format but did not make any decisions. We might have
a property to select between 8 and 16 bits. I originally thought that
SDF had to contain actual distance in pixels.That is not necessary
because it is subject to interpolation and thresholding and can be
normalized arbitrarily, e.g from 0 for -spread to 255 for +spread.The
default choice should be a matter of convenience.I would like to hear
some opinions on this.