Introducing Glyph Protocol for Terminals
13 points by goldstein
13 points by goldstein
Fonts are a distribution problem disguised as a rendering problem.
True!
If the user already has Nerd Fonts installed, a query lets you skip shipping your own glyph entirely; if they don’t, you ship the outline and the icon shows up anyway.
Nice! Before I went reading in, I was really hoping that application-shipped stuff to be easily overridden by user, similar to whole font right now, and the protocol actually puts that on priority. Thanks a lot for working on this, I cannot wait to see it evolve with more features.
Man.. we need sustained discussions on Unicode rendering in general! I'm about to ship UTF-8 support on my emulator next weekend and I'm surprised by lack of industry consensus.
Like I have to make bizarre choices around the grid placement of grapheme clusters, after text shaping the gnarlier codepoints. (Translation: how many grid columns should your emoji occupy?) This is an open-ended problem because terminals disagree on how to handle this -- notice the "closed" GitHub issue is still referenced all the damn time.
Back to our original quote:
Fonts are a distribution problem disguised as a rendering problem.
For sure. I have certain fallback fonts bundled with the emulator. We lazily load the glyphs we detect don’t exist in the user's font. Not super pleased with that complication, but it's less irritating than users reporting the terminal's broken.