Wgpu blitting chars to screen

1

Suppose we have:

struct Color { r: u8, g: u8, b: u8 }

struct Colored_u8 { value: u8, color: Color }

my_screen: [[Colored_u8; 100]; 50]

is there a simple to use & efficient wgpu library for blitting my_sreen to a wgpu surface ?

2

If you are already using wgpu, then you do not need very much more than you have.

  1. Change your struct declarations to have a more convenient, guaranteed layout:

    #[derive(Clone, Copy, bytemuck::NoUninit)]
#[repr(C)]
struct Color { r: u8, g: u8, b: u8 }

#[derive(Clone, Copy, bytemuck::NoUninit)]
#[repr(C)]
struct Colored_u8 { color: Color, value: u8 }

    Now, an array of these structs may be interpreted as a standard RGBA image (ignoring the alpha), because Colored_u8 is guaranteed (via repr(C)) to be exactly 4 bytes, r, g, b, value.

  2. Take bytemuck::bytes_of() this array and upload it as a texture, just like if it were an image.

  3. Draw 1 full-screen triangle and have the fragment shader read your texture, ignoring the alpha component.

This is more or less as efficient as it gets; there are no extraneous copies or conversions.

3

Is there a crate that handles this part? Takes a font, creates sdf texture atlas, has sdf texture shader ?

4

Oh, I thought you meant you had an array whose elements were pixels.

I don't have any advice for high-quality text rendering. Sorry.