I’ve found that there is a fair amount of confusion regarding how text rendering actually ends up working. In particular, it seems that the design of the system in general often goes unnoticed. First of all, there is a major division between the layout of text and the rendering of text. These two problems are very different, and are usually solved by different libraries authored by different people. The interface between these two systems is straightforward: A sequence of glyphs, along with a lo...