> [1] and [2] sound similar to what you are describing. They still involve triangulating the shape, but the triangulation process seems much simpler

Yes, they describe one variation of the angle based method to winding numbers by spanning a triangle fan from an arbitrarily chosen pivot point / vertex.

> if you want to do distance based anti-aliasing rather than supersampling

Particularly when it comes to rendering vector graphics I think of analytic anti-aliasing methods as somewhat cursed and prefer multisampling [0], at least for magnification. For minification mip-mapping remains the go to solution. However, if you only render 2D text on a 2D plane, which is typically overlap free, then these correctness issues don't matter.

> I don't see a straightforward way to apply this technique in a pixel shader that includes multiple curves per triangle

All modern vector renderers I know of avoid triangle rasterization entirely. Like I said, they typically do tiles (screen space partitioned into quads) in a compute shader instead of using the fixed functionality with a fragment / pixel shader. The reason is that nowadays compute is cheap and memory bandwidth is the bottle neck. Thus, it makes sense to load a bunch of overlapping geometry from global memory into workgroup shared memory, render all of it down to pixels in workgroup shared memory, and then only write these pixels back to the framebuffer in global memory.

> I feel like any attempt to do that will approach the complexity of Slug

A highly optimized implementation might very well, yes. Yet, handling the many cases of intersections of the path and the scanline won't be contributing to the complexity, which is what started this discussion.

> I would love to read more detailed information on that if you have it.

I implemented the outdated stencil buffer + triangle fan + implicit curves approach [1] if you want to take a look under the hood. The library is quite complex because it also handles the notoriously hard rational cubic bezier curves analytically, which Slug does not even attempt and just approximates. But the integral quadratic bezier curves are very simple and that is what is comparable to the scope Slug covers. It is just a few lines of code for the vertex shader [2], the fragment shader [3] and the vertex buffer setup [4].

Edit: You can even spin loop & blinn into a scanline method / hybrid: They give you the side of the curve your pixel is on [5], which is typically also the thing scanline methods are interested in. They compute the exact intersection location relative to the pixel, only to throw away most of the information and only keep the sign (side the pixel is on). So, that might be the easiest fragment shader vector renderer possible. Put it together in a shader toy [6] a while back.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473247#46530503 [1]: https://github.com/Lichtso/contrast_renderer [2]: https://github.com/Lichtso/contrast_renderer/blob/main/src/s... [3]: https://github.com/Lichtso/contrast_renderer/blob/main/src/s... [4]: https://github.com/Lichtso/contrast_renderer/blob/main/src/f... [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626037#45627274 [6]: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/fsXcDj

A Decade of Slug