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A Decade of Slug - Eric Lengyel

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What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the Slug Library not long afterward. Since then, Slug has been licensed widely in the video games industry as well as by an array of companies specializing in areas like scientific visualization, CAD, video editing, medical equipment, and even planetariums. Our clients include Activision, Blizzard, id Software, 2K Games, Ubisoft, Warner Brothers, Insomniac, Zenimax, and Adobe among many others. Slug turned out to be the most successful software product I’ve ever made. I originally created Slug in pursuit of better text rendering for the C4 Engine, where fonts needed to look great not only in the GUI, but inside game levels where they could appear very large and be viewed at o

Eric Lengyel • March 17, 2026 What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the Slug Library not long afterward. Since then, Slug has been licensed widely in the video games industry as well as by an array of companies specializing in areas like scientific visualization, CAD, video editing, medical equipment, and even…

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