Description
Fonts are important. Much of our communication relies on written words.
And software like GNOME that is used all over the world needs to support
many scripts.
In this talk, I will present an overview of font technologies, covering both
the content of font files and the software stack that is used to go from those
files to the glyphs you see on your screen.
The talk will be accessible to anyone with a general interest in typography and
graphics and should be interesting to application developers and anybody who
wants to get a better understanding of text rendering on Linux.
| Tracks | Application Development and Deployment |
|---|---|
| Talk Description | The background for this talk is work I've done over the past year or so, building towards a Pango 2.0. But this is not a presentation of Pango 2.0 - for that, watch my GUADEC talk. In this talk, I will focus on two related topics: 1. Fonts themselves. For this part, I will give some historical background (type1 vs TrueType, OpenType), cover more recent developments (variations, color in fonts), and give some outlook as to what might be coming in the future. 2. Libraries involved in font rendering. For this part, I want to provide a walk-through of the text rendering stack, from freetype over cairo and fontconfig to harfbuzz and pango, outlining the role of each component. To keep this from being too dry and technical, I will show some demos of font technology in action. The goal of the presentation is to give application developers a glimpse into a part of the platform the may otherwise take for granted, let them gain a better understanding of the problems and solutions for font rendering in GNOME, and provide inspiration for more creative use of fonts in user interfaces. I hope most people will leave this talk with at least one thought of "I did not know GNOME's text rendering could do this". |
| Author(s) Bio | Matthias has been involved in GNOME for a long time. He is one of the maintainers of GTK, and a member of the release team. He is a manager in the desktop team at Red Hat, and lives in Massachusetts. |
| Pronouns | he/him |
| Twitter and/or Mastodon Handle | matthias_clasen |
| Where are you located? | Massachusetts |
| Do you need travel sponsorship from GNOME Foundation in order to join our event? | No |
Primary author
Matthias Clasen
