I don't quite know what you mean. I don't think Raph is talking about SDF in the same way that people often talk about it, as a way to use the sampling hardware

I don't quite know what you mean. I don't think Raph is talking about SDF in the same way that people often talk about it, as a way to use the sampling hardware to improve alpha-tested magnification for fonts and other monochrome shapes. Rather he's talking about computing the distance to a stroke in a shader and using that to approximate a coverage value. You can view that as a type of distance field, and it is, technically, but it's not using the texture mapping hardware as for example the Valve paper does. An image editor that rendered with distance fields in the sense of this article would basically just be a regular vector editor, like Illustrator.