A Decade of Slug • Hacker News Board

Re: A Decade of Slug

#41

Post by elengyel » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 2:10 AM UTC

wei03288 wrote: post #39

[flagged]

Glyph complexity has no effect on the calculations done in the pixel shader and does not change how glyphs are preprocessed. There are no edge cases. If you'd like to see some ridiculously complex fonts get rendered with Slug, check out the 8th page in the demo at sluglibrary.com. Some of those individual glyphs are composed of over 1000 Bézier curves!

Re: A Decade of Slug

#42

Post by teaearlgraycold » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 2:33 AM UTC

actionfromafar wrote: post #7

miloignis wrote: post #2

This is wonderful news, and my sincere thanks to the author. I remember coming upon this algorithm several years ago, and thinking it was extremely elegant and very appealing, but being disappointed by the patent status making it unusable for FOSS work. I really appreciate the author's choice to dedicate it to the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, and congratulations on the success it had while proprie…

Software patents valid for 8 years is actually something I could get behind.

Copyrights universally dropped to ~20 years as well while we're at it.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#43

Post by rhaen » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

wei03288 wrote: post #39

[flagged]

Please don’t post AI generated comments, it’s against the rules and also just a waste of people’s time.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#44

Post by kibibu » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 3:04 AM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #31

amluto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 years ago I would have loved that. But I don't actually know many people still doing any of this sort of work on Windows. (I get it. It's an awesome replacement for MathType. It uses OLE so that it embeds in Microsoft Word nicely. Still...)

What stack are those people using?

He has a post up: https://terathon.com/blog/radical-pie.html

I'm pretty confident the "stack" is C++ on Win32, with a bunch of hand-rolled libraries and no stdlib.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#45

Post by mmooss » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 3:10 AM UTC

kibibu wrote: post #44

mmooss wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stack are those people using?

He has a post up: https://terathon.com/blog/radical-pie.html I'm pretty confident the "stack" is C++ on Win32, with a bunch of hand-rolled libraries and no stdlib.

Hmmm ... the GP says

> I don't actually know many people still doing any of this sort of work on Windows.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#46

Post by kibibu » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 3:29 AM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #45

kibibu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a post up: https://terathon.com/blog/radical-pie.html I'm pretty confident the "stack" is C++ on Win32, with a bunch of hand-rolled libraries and no stdlib.

Hmmm ... the GP says > I don't actually know many people still doing any of this sort of work on Windows.

I think they meant writing complex equations on windows

Re: A Decade of Slug

#47

Post by tokyovigilante » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 3:43 AM UTC

Thanks Eric, much appreciated. How would you compare your approach to something like Vello (https://github.com/linebender/vello)?

Re: A Decade of Slug

#48

Post by mmooss » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 5:31 AM UTC

kibibu wrote: post #46

mmooss wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm ... the GP says > I don't actually know many people still doing any of this sort of work on Windows.

I think they meant writing complex equations on windows

Or doing work that regularly involves writing complex equations, which is what I was asking about - what field and what do they use?

Re: A Decade of Slug

#49

Post by elengyel » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 5:37 AM UTC

tokyovigilante wrote: post #47

Thanks Eric, much appreciated. How would you compare your approach to something like Vello ( https://github.com/linebender/vello )?

Vello is intended more for general vector graphics and would probably perform better with pictures containing lots of large paths. Slug is designed specifically for rendering glyph-like objects and would perform better with lots of text and icons.

Re: A Decade of Slug

#50

Post by delta_p_delta_x » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 5:57 AM UTC

amluto wrote: post #28

cachius wrote: post #11

His latest project is https://radicalpie.com/ A Professional Equation Editor for Windows 10/11 for 60$ that uses Slug for rendering. Presumably he‘s using it to write his great FGED books.

25 years ago I would have loved that. But I don't actually know many people still doing any of this sort of work on Windows. (I get it. It's an awesome replacement for MathType. It uses OLE so that it embeds in Microsoft Word nicely. Still...)

> But I don't actually know many people still doing any of this sort of work on Windows.

Most primary, secondary, and pre-university school teachers without an institutional understanding of LaTeX, which admittedly has an extremely high (technical, not financial) barrier to entry compared to Microsoft Word + MathType. This is what my secondary school teachers used, for instance. They're given bog-standard laptops with Windows to work with.

Also exam setters and writers in places like Cambridge University Press and Assessment. If you took a GCSE, O-level, or A-level exam administered by them, it had pretty high quality typesetting for maths, physics diagrams, chemistry skeletal diagrams and reaction pathways... But almost none of it was done with LaTeX, and instead probably all add-ons to Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign.