Comment by Lichtso
> The distance is only irrelevant for plain 2D text rendering, right?
Yes, as I said it is relevant for text rendering, but not necessarily 2D. It can also be embedded in a 3D perspective as long as the text itself is planar. Meaning you can directly render text in a 3D scene this way without rendering to a texture first.
> But real shadows and lighting would require the distance aspect, no?
I think the difference is in stroke vs fill, not the illumination (as you could still use shadow mapping / projection). In stroking you need to calculate an offset curve either explicitly or implicitly sample it from a signed distance field. Thus the exact distance matters for stroking, for filling it does not.
Couldn’t you do stroking by doing a second fill operation on a slightly scaled down version of the first with the negative space color as the interior?