Fonts Rendering on GNU/Linux System - Pt. 0
People think that computers are smart. So smart that they take their life-affecting decision based on computer’s response. They have this perception because of the AI, because the intelligence they’re seeing now with computer software. But, don’t forget that computers are still dumb like they were 50 years ago. Certainly they know know more words (machine instructions) than they were knowing 50 years ago. But, that doesn’t make them such a intelligent.
The reason why we are seeing intelligence in computer is because of the layer of abstractions. Someone created something so that computer can react on 0 and 1. As computer know know how to react on 0 and 1, someone else created something on top of it on how to react on 00, 01, 10, 11. That means computer can react on now four things (00, 01, 10, 11) instead of two because computer already know how to react on two values (0 and 1). They come and build something on top of something as layer of abstractions. And here we are computer react on our life-impacting questions!
One of the layer that is accepted by people is font rendering. They assume that displaying the text on screen is fundamental to computer that computer has this native ability. No! tens of thousand if not million lines of code is written to display the text on screen. Displaying the text on screen or font rendering is tedious, boring thing, and under reputed thing that nobody is talking about. under reputed - yes, tell someone that as programmer, I’m working on software the display text on screen and they say like, what’s new that is already a computer is doing.
With this series of the articles, I’m planning to shed a light on topic - “fonts rendering on GNU/Linux system”. Yes, GNU/Linux system because these articles are created and tested against GNU/Linux system (Debian, if you care)! These articles are not in depth article but exposure to the topic so that you can deep dive further because font rendering is not something simple covered within few articles. It requires extensive technical and background knowledge from multiple domains - linguistic, computer science, art, mathematics are few.