• 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