libschrift

libschrift is ~1500 lines of C: https://github.com/tomolt/libschrift My Ruby rewrite is ~600 lines: https://github.com/vidarh/skrift Libschrift is very readable. I did my Ruby rewrite basically just top to bottom before reorganizing it. Mine is... readable if you're well versed in Ruby, but still has some warts where it's less than idiomatic Ruby because I stuck closely to the original. Basically TTF has a crufty binary format, but the basic font data if you're willing to ignore ligatures, hinting, OpenType support and emoticons, is fairly simple (it's basically a bunch of polygons consisting of quadratic beziers and lines, and quadratic beziers are easy to tesselate into lines if you don't want to do a more complex curve renderer), just error-prone to figure out. If you want/need OpenType you need to support cubic beziers on top of that

"Needed" is subjective. Libschrift[1] is an example of a TTF renderer that doesn't do any. I translated Libscrift to Ruby[2], and I considered whether to add support for it, and decided it wasn't worth it for my use (it's now the font-renderer for my terminal, and by extension my editor) despite only using it on 1920x1080 on a 27" monitor. My reasoning for not bothering was much what you suggest - if it's acceptable to me now on a resolution that low, I'm not sure I see the point in supporting even worse conditions given how cheap 4K displays are. The need for hinting is only going to go down. Maybe one day, but I'll note e.g. FreeType also did a lot of work on auto-hinting because as it turns out the hinting in a lot of TTF files is pure garbage. [1] https://github.com/tomolt/libschrift [2] https://github.com/vidarh/skrift - X11 integrat

i look forward to seeing it! the simple, approachable truetype implementation is very exciting already! i didn't know about libschrift, but one third the code makes Skrift three times as approachable do you have an output sample like https://github.com/tomolt/libschrift/raw/master/resources/de...?