Text Rendering Hates You

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.

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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.

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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.