Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard!
To my knowledge, literally no system renders text "perfectly". It's all
best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
Text Rendering Hates
You
I don't know if I'm glad or sad I didn't read this article before
rendering HTML into different formats. On the one hand, it might have completely
discouraged me from even starting. On the other hand, I don't use the full
span of Unicode characters in my blog posts (which I'm very thankful
for, after doing all this work). But on the gripping hand, Lynx was doing a
horrible job at formatting HTML into text, and what I have now is much better
looking.
So let's see … we now have three hard things in Computer
Science:
- cache invalidation;
- naming things;
- text rendering;
- and “off-by-one” errors.
Yup, that seems about right.
You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go
ahead, I won't bite. I promise.
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