Phillip Tennen posts about writing a TrueType font renderer. TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The challenge comes from describing this to the computer in a way that’s efficient and resizable. Fonts shouldn’t take up too much storage, and we should be able to scale a font to any size the user requests while preserving the character of the font design. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll want to satisfy these constraints while also making the text pleasant to read.
TrueType: the de facto standard for encoding and distributing fonts. Unlike humble 8×8 bitmaps, TrueType fonts are distributed as structured binary files (.ttf). We’ll need to parse these files and render their data into pixels.
TrueType describes how to draw each glyph by listing a series of points, which collectively compose the outline of each glyph. It’s up to the renderer to connect these points into lines, to turn these lines into curves, and to ‘color inside the lines’ as appropriate. There’s more nuance here, but that’s the bare bones.
See how the discussion progresses and some calculations are made to draw characters in the post here.
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