Esfahbod: State of Text Rendering 2024

On his blog, Behdad Esfahbod has published a lengthy and detailed look at the state of open-source text rendering. It looks at the libraries available, application support, future directions, and gives a summary analysis of the ecosystem.

In broad strokes, OpenType added support for color fonts, variable fonts, and the Universal Shaping Engine. The Free & Open Source stack supports all of these advances at the lower level, but application UI support has been slower to arrive. The Open Source text stack also gained enormous market-share when Android and Google Chrome fully embraced it.

Looking forward, there is a Rust migration of the text stack underway, which will unify font compilation and consumption under a safe programming language. Incremental Font Transfer will enable streaming fonts to web browsers. And my proposed Wasm-fonts will enable more expressive fonts.