Mastodawn

@behdad thank you! That is a big improvement on my screen.

@behdad Thanks for that amazing demo. Text looks very nice on my phone. But on my computer screen which has 1x pixel density small text looks a little not so good. Are there any tricks to improve rendering on lower density screens?

Oliver Wipfli 4d ago

behdad 5d ago

Update on the Slug algorithm Open Source implementation: I absorbed GLyphy into a new HarfBuzz module called hb-gpu.

Check out the web demo. Interact with it with the mouse. Or press space to animation rotation:

https://behdad.org/hb-gpu-demo

Discuss hb-gpu at:

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/pull/5878

HarfBuzz GPU Demo

Oliver Wipfli Mar 18

behdad Mar 18

Great news today for GPU-accelerated text rendering:

"""
I was granted a patent for the Slug algorithm in 2019, and I legally have exclusive rights to it until the year 2038. But I think that’s too long. The patent has already served its purpose well, and I believe that holding on to it any longer benefits nobody. Therefore, effective today, I am permanently and irrevocably dedicating the Slug patent to the public domain. ...

To aid in implementations of the Slug algorithm, reference vertex and pixel shaders based on the actual code used in the Slug Library have been posted in a new GitHub repository and made available under the MIT license. ...
"""

Thank you, @EricLengyel!

https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html

A Decade of Slug - Eric Lengyel

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Oliver Wipfli Feb 7

@mdione @mapterhorn The entire PMTiles dataset is now 9.8 TiB. You can see the sizes on https://mapterhorn.com/data-access.

Data Access | Mapterhorn

Oliver Wipfli Nov 24

Small blog post on blending https://oliverwipfli.ch/canvas-multiply-blending-2025-11-24/

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Oliver Wipfli Oct 24

I learned it like this...

Oliver Wipfli Oct 24

When you learned to subtract numbers by hand, did you learn it with this "borrowing" method?
I forgot how to subtract say 384 from 2173 and asked some chatbots "how do you subract by hand with pen and paper". They all explain it with this super strange borrowing method. Here in Switzerland I just learned to add a 1 if you cross zero...

Oliver Wipfli Oct 10

Multiply blending is nice for topographic maps, it keeps the greenness of forest much better than normal alpha blending. By coincidence I learned today that multiply blending can help as well for burning gaps around letters into contour lines. Here are some screenshots, code and demo see https://github.com/wipfli/hillshade-multiply-blending

Oliver Wipfli Sep 11, 2025

I bought a Seagate Exos X24 hard disk drive. First test gave these numbers:

Write one 80 GiB file (85135469091 bytes): 4min 36s -> 294 MiB / sec
Read one 80 GiB file (85135469091 bytes): 5min 31s -> 245 MiB / sec