[raphlinus]

Not to keep flogging my own work, but something kinda similar is my blurred rounded rectangle shader[1]. That is super-fast and produces very nice smooth shadows, but is limited in the shapes it can blur because it uses tricks that make a lot of assumptions about them. I also prototyped light sources other than gaussian, specifically disk, and I think that generalizes pretty well.

Given that the original article is blurring glyphs, one thing that might be worth exploring is decomposing the glyph into primitive shapes. For example "b" can be a rect for the stem, an ellipsoid for the main bowl, and another ellipsoid (with negative sign) for the inner countour of the bowl. It doesn't have to be perfect because you're only rendering the blurred shapes. And no doubt you could have some kind of automated process that refines the decomposition when it can use more primitive shapes.

Though our techniques are different, it's interesting (and not terribly surprising) that they both use some of the same techniques under the hood, specifically distance fields, and that we cite some of the same people.

I should mention that of course shadows and blurs are not the same thing, but sometimes you can use one for the other in a pinch :)

[1] https://raphlinus.github.io/graphics/2020/04/21/blurred-roun...