the reason slug has two bands is precisely because of its anti-aliasing. you having only one implies you do the AA differently, or are less efficient with searches off the main direction.

for readers: the slug shader traces two rays, one horizontally, and one vertically, to find out if a pixel is inside a glyph or outside. one would be enough for pure inside outside, but for anti-aliasing purposes it's also helpful to know how far away you are from the closest edge. but if you have a horizontal ray running parallel to a horizontal glyph edge (not uncommon), the ray glyph intersection will return no value at all. so slug traces two rays and blends between them for anti-aliasing that always works in both cases. the bands mentioned here are just acceleration structures, basically a list of cells where each tells you which parts of a glyph are contained within it.

it's still approximate. a true ground truth would just supersample and do many point-in-glyph tests within one real pixel - at edges some of them would be inside, and some of them would be outside, giving you a smooth value to display depending on the shape of the glyph within the edge pixel.