Text Rendering Hates You - Alexis Beingessner
▻https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-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.
1 Terminology
2 Style, Layout, and Shape All Depend On Each Other?
3 Text Isn’t Individual Characters
3.1 Text Overlaps
3.2 Style Can Change Mid-Ligature
4 Emoji Broke Color and Style
5 Anti-Aliasing Is Hell
5.1 AA Breaks Glyph Caches
5.2 Subpixel-AA Isn’t Composable
6 Esoterica
6.1 Fonts Can Contain SVG
6.2 Characters Can Be Too Damn Big
6.3 Selection Isn’t A Box, And Text Goes In All The Directions
6.4 How Do You Write That You Can’t Write?
6.5 Style Is Part of The Font (Except When It’s Not)
7 Additional Links
via @archiloque