Text rendering is cursed. Anyone who has worked on text will tell you the same; whether it's about layout, bi-directional, shaping, Unicode, or the rendering itself, it's never a completely solved problem. In my personal case, I've been working on trying to render text in the context of a compositing engine for creative content. I needed crazy text effects, and I needed them to be reasonably fast, which implied working with the GPU as much as possible. The distance field was an obvious requir...