Post by @alcinnz@floss.social

2026-07-25 03:12 UTC

You might be surprised to learn how complex text rendering is, at least if you want to deliver an inclusive solution! Which early computers misleadingly didn't. So in a nutshell, what does it involve? Since the early 1990s we've been using vector fonts (in Apple's TrueType font format, & variants thereof) so the shapes remain sharp no matter how tiny or massive you draw it. This does mean software needs to "rasterize" these vector for display. What else? 1/4?

Replies (3)

@macbraughton@infosec.exchange 2026-07-25 03:51

@alcinnz@floss.social I’ve been diving deep here myself, and have learned that typefaces and rendering them in a way that doesn’t look like crap is actually incredibly sophisticated technology disguised as trivially simple if you’re thinking about it from the angle of “just writing some text”. Learned recently that Knuth delayed publishing his masterpiece for ten years until he got TeX into a state where it could render his vision adequately.

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@alcinnz@floss.social 2026-07-25 03:22

We need to consult the font determine which of its "glyphs" to render at which (relative) positions to represent each character(s) in the text to render. While for "latinate" languages like English this is straightforward, it can get quite involved. Particularly for languages like Arabic or Thai. We need to determine where to split lines of text. Multilingual text may need to be rearranged into a consistent visual order. We need to lookup which font to use for given text styles. 2/5?

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@kirtai@tech.lgbt 2026-07-25 12:37

@alcinnz@floss.social Are you familiar with the Hershey fonts? They are vector fonts designed in 1967 for CRTs.

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