Text Rendering Hates You

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Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.

Just so you have an idea for how a typical text-rendering pipeline works, here’s a quick sketch:

  1. Styling (parse markup, query system for fonts)
  2. Layout (break text into lines)
  3. Shaping (compute the glyphs in a line and their positions)
  4. Rasterization (rasterize needed glyphs into an atlas/cache)
  5. Composition (copy glyphs from the atlas to their desired positions)

Unfortunately, these steps aren’t as clean as they might seem.

Delightful dive into the variety of issues that face developers who have to implement text rendering. Turns out this is, and might always remain, an unsolved issue.

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