> Wait. I guess you did not read the article at all? It is all about atlasing.

Yes, I understand the technique. Perhaps I should be more clear about my terminology. I'm using "atlas" in the narrow sense of "actual pieces of bitmap data stored in a texture". My point is that this technique should not be a substitute for atlasing in this sense, but could well be combined with it.

I don't know why you are being downvoted, that is what is happening and I am not convinced that straight textures would be better. We already know that SDF textures are better than straight texture atlases anyway. The technique is obviously practical in some respect (since it renders a pdf faster than anything else I've seen) and the quality of the text is very sharp, even close up.

Super sharp lines when zoomed in may not seem like a big deal, but as you increase resolution you will reap the benefits since the same size text will be sharper.

The FS is something like 200 lines (verified in the WebGL debugger). A blitting shader is about 5. If fragment shading load doesn't matter, then of course you don't need straight textures. But if you want to reduce the load on the GPU and do the efficient thing, without any quality loss, it's better to use atlases.

> We already know that SDF textures are better than straight texture atlases anyway.

Even that depends. SDFs are slow to construct and, because they have a special FS, you have to pay attention to the number of state changes. They do have the advantage (unlike this technique) of having a very simple FS--they can even be used in some fixed function hardware!--making it practical to rerasterize glyphs every frame.

> The technique is obviously practical in some respect (since it renders a pdf faster than anything else I've seen)

That says a lot about how existing PDF renderers are slow and nothing about what is the fastest thing to do on the GPU.

> We already know that SDF textures are better than straight texture atlases anyway.

This is isn't true. SDF textures can be "better" for "some" applications (like games that want to display stencils mostly at arbitrary zoom levels without losing a lot of quality) but they're also visibly lower-quality compared to glyphs rendered by freetype at each one of these zoom levels.

So, for an application that simply displays lots of text while infrequently changing the glyph size, SDF textures are not a good solution.

You are essentially saying that an SDF texture isn't as good as a freetype glyph rendered at the resolution it is being displayed at. If you don't have to change the zoom of what you are looking at you don't have to use a texture at all, you can just use the pixels from the freetype vector render directly.