It's looks like such a simple thing and I've been taking it for granted. Simply because how it just seems to work anywhere and everywhere. It's like being in awe of a tomato. Until you try to do it yourself. From the ground up, mostly from the ground up. Mostly because Stb TrueType is the starting point. It seems quite unnecessary to understand font rendering. Mainly because there are plenty of well established ways to render font on a screen. It's the exact same reason that makes me want to render font. It's true to the ethos of Handmade hero. There is nothing wrong with using a library. Just like there is value in understand the thing that library is implementing for you. At least for me there is. Building the thing is my favorite bit anyway. It's intrinsically true to who I am.
So far I've got font rending on to the screen but it looks like crap. I've just managed to align the fonts right but it hardly legible when the font size goes below 10. When it should be as the X11 text printing works just fine.
So why font rendering?
It's part of a bigger project. I'd like to build a debugger for Zig. Mostly because I can't get any of the other ones to work on the latest versions of Zig. Even more so because I think I can do a better job at it myself. Because I know what I want. And have no clue about how easy or complex building a debugger is. I think that's a good thing. False confidence to the rescue.
The truth is I haven't tried very hard to get the other debuggers to work. Someone on stream suggested that I could build the latest LLDB from source and it should work. You see I don't want to go through all that trouble. Not the trouble of building from source. I do it whenever possible, like the Ghostty terminal for example. I've finally found a itch that I'd like to scratch for myself. Debuggers don't seem to be working at all for Zig and it's an opportunity to build a debugger that shows me what I need to know. After all it's going to be catered to an audience of one, in a worse case scenario. So why the hell not, eh?