Dan Q
The first “full” day of WordCamp Europe 2023 (which kicked-off at Contributor Day) was busy and intense, but I loved it.
This post is basically a live-blog of everything I got up to, and it’s mostly for my own benefit/notetaking. If you don’t read it, nobody will blame you.
Here’s what I got up to:
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A s*** font that f***ing censors bad language automatically.
This is pretty beautiful, in a sick-and-wrong way. It’s a font which contains ligatures that can be automatically used by supported software. But instead of ligatures for things like æ and œ, this font replaces the letters of common swear words with a glyph that looks like a censor bar. So it’s an automatically-self-censoring font.
Better yet, the authors were aware of the Scunthorpe problem and attempted to mitigate it; this also provides the font’s name. Unfortunately it’s not possible to do so perfectly without adding ligatures for just about every dictionary word individually (now that would be a font) so words like shitake and cockerel still get censored. And even where the mitigation works, it produces other problems: e.g. the use of the ligature Scunthorpe means that the word cannot be broken e.g. hyphenated across two lines. Nor will letter counters work properly.
But I don’t think anybody’s suggesting that this font should actually see mainstream use. Right?
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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.
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Just so you have an idea for how a typical text-rendering pipeline works, here’s a quick sketch:
- Styling (parse markup, query system for fonts)
- Layout (break text into lines)
- Shaping (compute the glyphs in a line and their positions)
- Rasterization (rasterize needed glyphs into an atlas/cache)
- 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.