Future font thoughts

[DigitalMonk]

So, this one is WAAAAAY in the future, probably, but wanted to toss it into the ring anyway.

I was thinking -- everywhere that fonts are used in the game, they exist in a physical/graphical setting -- engraved in stone, ink on paper, etc -- and it would be cool if the fonts could interact with those backgrounds.

I'm wondering about pixel shaders that essentially alpha blend into the background. For instance:

• Ink on paper is the easier of my two examples -- within the glyph outline, do a (mostly?) solid fill. Around the edges, effect some occasional bleeding with tendrils of alpha. If it could make sense with the paper texture, even better, but that overly complicated for the minor benefit...
• Engraved in stone might need SDF-like fonts to work... You'd need a midline through the glyph, and (for instance) the portion to the left of the midline should blend light with the background, and the portion to the left of the midline should blend shadow with the background (If I'm remembering the normal UI panel convention of simulating light coming from the right). Bonus points if cracks could be added outside the glyph, with logic like the ink bleeding...

Then, for each context where text appears, the appropriate interaction shader can be used to make the font appear artistically blended into the scene. Meanwhile, actual font choice can be left up to the user by letting them drop their favorite TTF into the Fonts directory.

If this is actually possible, it seems like the best of both worlds: easy user configurability and cool automatic artistic integration.