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.
Text Editing Hates You Too
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You, published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
Text rendering and effects using GPU-computed distances
Text rendering is cursed. Anyone who has worked on text will tell you the same; whether it's about layout, bi-directional, shaping, Unicode, or the rendering itself, it's never a completely solved problem. In my personal case, I've been working on trying to render text in the context of a compositing engine for creative content. I needed crazy text effects, and I needed them to be reasonably fast, which implied working with the GPU as much as possible. The distance field was an obvious requirement because it unlocks anti-aliasing and the ability to make many great effects for basically free.
AI-text detection tools are really easy to fool
A recent crop of AI systems claiming to detect AI-generated text perform poorly—and it doesn’t take much to get past them.
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering
A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering.
Text-Only Back Issues of PMC
Introducing Glyph Protocol for Terminals - Raphael Amorim
There’s one thing about terminals that has always bothered me: to get your favorite editor, prompt, or TUI to render nicely, you are almost always forced to install a patched font. You know the drill. You open a fresh terminal, pull up your editor, and half of the UI is replaced by little rectangles — the infamous tofu. The fix is to go download a Nerd Font, or Powerline, or some other patched set, and switch your terminal font to it. A font that is often well above 10MB in size1. All of that — just so you can render...
The Future of Text
We are a community dedicated to working on how we can better develop text to augment our capabilities and we invite you to join us. We believe that the potential of richly interactive text to truly augment how we think & communicate is massive. Text after all, is externalized symbols we can interact with to extend our mind’s reach. Therefore text is not just a medium, it is also a tool for thought, and we are looking Beyond Visual Range.
The hardest working font in Manhattan
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
etui
A TUI library for Gleam: correct Unicode, minimal-diff rendering, clean terminal teardown.
#10: "Bad at CSS" by Keith Cirkel
Burning Logo Generator
Cool Text is the worlds most popular graphics generator. Online since 1998, our servers have rendered billions of free images.
Incremental Font Transfer Demo
This demonstrates the use of the incremental font transfer (IFT) to load font data for display of a variety of scripts. IFT works by using patches to extend a font to cover more codepoints and/or axes as they are encountered in rendered text. This allows loading of only the parts of a font that are actually needed. This demo is using a fully static (ie. no dynamic backend) version of IFT. IFT is currently in development with the w3c webfonts working group and an early draft of the specification implemented by this demo can be found here.
BadAppleFont
It is possible to embed a animation into a font, with only a small amount of hacking
@eva.town hi! I really like what you did with hypertext.tv - how did you create that old school pixelated effect?
Hypertext TV
hypertext.tv