README

visclientweb

Browser-based data visualisation work-in-progress.

So far only some text rendering experiments...

As visclientweb will render a lot of text in realtime, ideally supporting different laguages and with high fidelity, we try to use distance-field based rendering. There are multiple libraries for implementing this for three.js. 

Here we check out troika-three. 

Unfortunately, most libraries in threejs context come as npm packages, with the need for a build system. To relief the burden of building while developing plain JS for the browser, we pre-build only those npm third-party libraries into dist/main.js as JS module, and use JS modules for all code under our control. So only changes to the npm-based library collection need a build process, developing and publishing our own code does not!

To build the libs use: 

   cd visclient
   webpack
   

npm & webpack need to be installed.

To run a simple server (no need for webpack's setup) do:

  cd dist
  python3 -m http.server

The third-party libraries reside in node_modules, the code importing them is in src/ (we won't use this for our own code), our own code currently sits at dist/index.html.