Hacker News Reader

I was shocked to find that there wasn’t a fully fleshed out text rendering engine for WebGL.

On the one hand I think you could argue that if you have a lot of text maybe html would suit your needs better. On the other hand a lot of UIs just need some text and it’s so east for it to look like junk.

View on HN

There's an entire layer of mid-level web APIs missing to better connect WebGL and WebGPU to all the other browser systems (like text and DOM rendering).

Ideally canvas with WebGL and WebGPU would sit at the bottom of the browser API layer cake, the DOM at the top and squeezed inbetween public APIs for text, shape, CSS+HTML rendering. But instead we got this weird canvas thing dangling off as another high-level DOM element.

Totally. It would be /amazing/ if I could leverage the browser's existing (and largely excellent) document and text layout engine from /within/ WebGL. Let me build up my UI as I want, and inject a DOM into that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com