Advances in font technology and GTK text rendering [LWN.net]
At this year's GUADEC in Denver, Colorado, Behdad Esfahbod and Matthias Clasen presented a two-part talk on a topic that's deeply important to desktop environments: fonts. Esfahbod covered advances in font technology that are making their way to becoming standards, and Clasen briefly discussed improvements in GTK text rendering. The talk presented some fascinating insights into the problems around accurately rendering writing systems on the desktop, and where font technologies may be going in the near future.
Esfahbod, a GNOME contributor for nearly 20 years and creator of the HarfBuzz text-shaping engine, started things off with his part of the talk "Better-Engineered Font-Formats", subtitled "yet another update". He noted that the talk was following up a much longer online presentation of the same name from 2021. (Slides are available here, and a there is also a summary of the talk prepared by Simon Cozens.) That talk was based on his ideas for future font formats and technologies, from ways to improve existing technologies like OpenType to more ambitious things like a future with fully programmable fonts. Esfahbod said that there has been work to push some of those ideas through the ISO standardization process since the presentation.