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The default fonts are just plain awful. It's trivial to drop in a better font and make it indistinguishable from native.

Possibly a licensing issue as to why they don't include better ones by default as you have to bake it in? or they want to make the binary as tiny as possible by not using a bigger font file?



Font is one thing.

The hard part is text layout which is a very very complicated affair, especially if you want to support different languages and/or writing systems.


Your comment reminded me of "Text Rendering Hates You" (https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330144 )


Yeah this. Once you get to something more than plain English, it means pulling in HarfBuzz


If you want visually pleasing results, even English needs layout processes like kerning.


:-/ must have mentioned that by 'plain' I meant monospace, С64-like




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