As per the old traditions of typesetting, fonts come in three cases; upper-case, lower-case, and edge-case.

A) I hate that math can be patented B) I had no idea how much math you had to do for just one letter

"...were designed to meet anticipated needs which never materialized" - i love that sentence

The worst part about watching a Sebastian Lague video: knowing you'll have to wait months for the next one...

I've tried loading and rendering fonts multiple times but stopped because of the complexity everywhere. I continue to be amazed at the level of debugging tools you write! And I appreciate how much effort you spend forming your work into a journey that's easy to follow. Thanks for showing one path through the complexity and taking a relaxed/fun approach to it! I'm inspired to try again!

You're the Bob Ross of programming. Your videos are so relaxing to watch, the learning is just an added bonus.

this entire video summarizes coding precisely; step 1. I want to make some kind of game engine! first off, I need to figure out how to render some text for the UI! step 162. it's been a few weeks and I've encountered one of the last bugs. I'm done coding after I get this text to render

After spending a long week focusing on quadratics, I come home for the weekend to unwind to videos containing parabolas.

the true nature of programming is beautifully (and very scary) encapsulated in this video: simple and beautiful solutions break down against gazillion corner cases, floating point math and "bad" input

That explanation of Bezier curves was just genius. You tricked me into learning them, and now I'll never forget about them.

The most impressive thing in this video and the thing that baffles me the most is how you never got tired of trying again and again to solve the artifacts problem. After a few tries I would have quit right then and there but you didn't.

I am always in utter awe at your ability to calmly (at least it's how you present it) tackle any topic in programming, without frustrations and abandonment. You are an inspiration for all of us aspiring programmers

After spending two painful days writing a point-in-polygon algorithm for last year's AdventOfCode, it warms my heart to see someone else struggle with the exact same edge cases. I sincerely thank you!❤ And also huge respect if you figured that out on your own. I ended up finding a paper that described the up/down crossing approach and went from there.

What I love about text is there's so much optional stuff that goes into rendering it besides drawing the glyphs like CTL, layout, pixel alignment, angry art leads complaining that the font looks terrible, ...

Old-school coder here, long before Truetype was the standard, but one that's always been fascinated by typefaces. I did briefly look into how to render Truetype on the Amiga but back then information wasn't easily available so I stuck using Agfa Intellifont and Postscript Type 1, and of course cool bitmap fonts for all the demo programming we did back then! I've always wondered how TT worked and this mammoth video was one of your very best videos, explaining in detail the format - and how to implement rendering without breaking copyright... Awesome! Thanks for putting in all the weeks I'm sure this video took to make?! I suspect the reason why Truetype is using a big-endian format is that Apple designed it on Motorola 68k. (same as the Amiga albeit Amiga was a much better computer than the Mac... ;) ) I miss programming big-endian since it was so much simpler to use, especially in assembler, and I secretly wish Intel would change at some point but I know the benefits using small-endian. Just an anecdote from the past... Anyhow, using shaders to compute the rendering of the fonts was clever because in the beginning I wondered how much CPU you were going to use just rendering some text with your approach, and thinking back to the days of running a 7 mHz 68000 trying to squeeze in all the computations between each raster line not knowing the power that we'd have available today, would I even have believed it?! Yet again many thanks for making all the videos you do! Top class productions for sure!

I legit laughed at 2 problems for the price of one. It's such a vibe for programming.

As soon as you said "The Beauty of Bezier Curves" I knew _exactly_ what was coming.

Only 5 minutes in but I can tell this is a video I'm going to watch and rewatch a hundred times. For one it's a Sebastian Lague video, which are always entertaining and insightful and calming, a combination which I cannot get enough of. Furthermore, the topic of this video seems to cross over with so many other topics which I find fascinating. The thumbnail reminded me of Posy's video on segmented displays. The title made me think of Tom7's videos on upper-uppercase and lower-lowercase letters, and the mention of compound glyphs 5 minutes in brings to mind his anaglyphs video. The description mentions Bezier curves which remind me of Freya Holmer's splines video, as well as floating point errors which remind me of, like, the handful of videos on floating point I've watched.

patents on algorithms should be illegal.

It shocks me when I realize how much effort has been put in all of these adventures and how much of this I don't see as the viewer. I mean 1) docs and articles research 2) implementing and debugging 3) coding interactive visualizations 4) coding debug tools 5) collecting all of the material into one smooth journey I'm pretty sure that I see just 10th part of all work been done to make this video happen. And the amount of behind the scenes work is the main reason why these adventures so interesting and comfortable to watch. Thank you for your job.

Your ability to just jump in to any odd thing and learn is both impressive and inspiring, and your videos are genuinely so much fun to watch, don’t ever stop doing what you do

2 minutes into the video and i'm already completely lost😭

As an amateur type designer, you definitely made the right choices of what to fix. Overlapping shapes are used in designing type, but not always compiled as such (I think most software can do a vector union for each glyph, but it might be avoided because of compound glyphs). Self intersections just can't be avoided in some designs, but they can be minimised. If you're working with lots of auto-generated weights, you can easily miss some. And a font that doesn't use the winding direction correctly does not deserve to be displayed. Unsurprisingly, you had to re-implement the entire postscript rendering algorithm to get at the end of the video. If I was to go so far, I'd simplify all curves to a quad or pentagon and say it was the fastest text renderer in the universe (*that avoids the pesky patents).

Studied this in computer science and I love that you covered it in a fun way. Because in college they teach it like reading a manual

A yes, the worst nightmare of Rendering.

1:09:59 "Graphic design is my passion" that took me so off guard LOL

Sebastian is the only person who can catch people's attention about FONTS for AN HOUR Dude your insane. I learn so much from every one of your videos. Keep uploading!

The 'twilight zone' cut-away... so good Sebastian, you're moving into 'film maker' level production here you realize...

1 Hour long Video? LETS GO! Thx Sebastian.

I was not expecting one of your videos covering dynamic unit testing as well as this one. Section "0:41:22 The Evil Artifact Detector" is great at communicating the concept and the benefit it can bring at scale.

That patent is so stupid it hurts. A patent on a programming technique should never be a thing. Its like patenting multiplication. It doesn't make any sense.

There is exactly one (1) UKpostsr who I would watch talk about displaying fonts programmatically for 70 minutes, and thank you for being him

THE KING IS BACK! Though on a more serious note, Sebastian Lague has inspired me to pursue my deepest questions and go hands-on to understand things fully. Thanks Sebastian Lague!

Another Sebastian video, i am so excited!

That was such an dive into all the intricacies of text! I'm surprised at how many math problems there are to solve just to show letters correctly on screen, that was really nice. Never a dull moment in the video, beautiful and well explained code. Congratulations, Sebastian!

I know I'll stop understanding about halfway through but I still watch because it's fascinating

omg, I've been following sebastian for so long see him post is about as rare and rewarding as a solar eclipse, just a couple of days ago I was rewatching his ants and slime simulation video and thought I'd try to do the ant colony optimisation in javascript and it took me a couple of days but I got it done, now working on porting it to C# in Unity to see how much faster it is, thank you for inspiring all of us Sebastian, your adventures pave the way for our own adventures too, hope you're doing well!

The multi-channel SDF you mentioned is my favorite text rendering method so far. It looks really good except for very small text when strokes become thinner than one pixel. Its main advantage is that it is extremely fast.

From 7k errors to 0. I admire your problem solving determination and skills❤

This brought back memories. Back in the day there used to be a standard called OpenVG that was supposed to accelerate font rendering using dedicated hardware… it ended up being deprecated because OpenGL ES ended being faster and it wasn’t worth the space on the chip. I love the ambition of your projects and the polish of your videos. I feel like my videos take so long to make so yours must be a full time job 😅

Never imagined i'd watch a 1hr video on text rendering, but,, i guess here we are

Having heard about Bezier Curves in a lecture and whatched the two videos you mentioned about them, this was at the exact perfect level of still interesting, but not overwhelmingly complex. Great video, as always!

this was so funny: Screen is on fire and "Let's start with the most serious issue first: Getting rid of that weird line"

This sums up a lot of what software development is: the hunches, the "good enough solution for now", the floating point shenanigans, the debug tools, the tests suite. This is a fantastic video, thanks!

Watching experts at work is always insightful; incredible work as always!

I've started a text rendering project just the last week or two and now I see that this legend has uploaded a video on the exact same topic. How is this even possible?

There is an interesting property of Bézier curves that makes splitting them at a point actually easier than expected (compared to what is done here in the curve splitting section). It is called "de Casteljau" subdivision. The new anchor point that lies on the line between the original anchor points of the curve is actually the linear interpolation with the same 't' as the splitting point. This can be visualized in your animation in "Bézier basics" where you show the interpolation line. We search the intersection between the tangent at the splitting point and the anchor line. The tangent is exactly the interpolation line.

Je suis développeur depuis longtemps et franchement les vidéos de Sebastian sont les meilleurs en terme de vulgarisation et exploration

I can't Believe i can read the intro text truly mind blowing how good our brains recognize patterns Im pretty sure the text reads "Coding adventures Rendering Text."

This video is pure art. I can't imagine that if I told anyone that I watched more than an hour long video on rendering fonts with a smile on my face, anyone would believe. But I did.

As someone who has written a typesetter, it seems very up your alley! I would love to see how you approach it and I think it’s a fascinating topic to dig into. Like font rendering, at its basic level it’s not *that* complex, you’ve already done the most basic advance width implementation, but as you start handling more complex mechanics it has almost limitless depth.

I'm continually blown away by the quality and depth of your videos, and your ability to demystify complex topics in such a clear and engaging way! I've recently been fascinated by procedural animation, especially after watching David Rosen's GDC talk and his video on the "Gibbon: Beyond the Trees" demo. I remember you used procedural animation for the spiders in one of your earlier Coding Adventures, and I would love to see a standalone video on the subject!

I absolutely love your videos. You have an uncanny ability to take almost any topic and make it interesting and entertaining. Thanks for the time and care you put into these videos. I always look forward to them.

Sebastian, you have to make a video about how you make all these animations, especially the 2D ones. They are beautiful! This one was great, as always!

Thank you Sebastian! You’ve tough me to never give up on the hard things in life. So inspiring how you fought this glitches in text

35:19 lol I love how you sold that joke with the visuals

Sebastian, a lot of games these days use the concept of signed distance fields and have a pixel shader do an alpha plot based on the distance from the text vectors. That might be an interesting one to have a go at once you’ve extracted all of the paths. Probably a good starting point for that one is a line draw routine that uses a pixel shader !

I'm so looking forward to watching this video once I have an hour to spare!

This might be my new favorite video of yours. Yes, watching chess or video game development is more "exciting", but exploring one of the oldest features of computers that we still use every single day is so interesting! I never would have guessed just how complex and smart font rendering is. I've noticed the colorful edges around text before but never looked up what it was for, so the sub-pixel AA explanation was appreciated too!

1h video from the dude who makes me want to continue and try at look and remember the fun parts of my programming journey and pushes me to learn and get better and keep enjoying things? I don't need sleep I need video! Sometimes it just takes another to show you how to recognize the parts of your life that you do get some fun from. I sometimes forget those parts and get lost in the everyday droning. I mean, don't get me wrong, rent and expenses these days make me think there is no future, but hey doesn't mean I have to stop and ignore the fun I may have along the way to doom right :) Thank you! I genuinely love watching your videos and trying to make the best of the time when I program, and try to better my skills at it. You sir, are really wholesome. God speed. I hope only good things come your way.

FREEDOM VECTOR RAHHHHH 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅

ive messed with opengl font rendering before and its super nice to see a video explaining everything, makes me wanna redo it using these tricks lol

Your bezier curves plugin helped me immensely when writing my bachelor dissertation. Funny thing is I never knew you created that plugin until years after completing my bachelors. Thank you so much! As someone else said in the comments, you are the Bob Ross of programming. I understand probably 10% and love when you show your own bugs. Please keep doing what you're doing!

Amount of work you put into visualizing the concepts is truly colossal. Your tenacious problem-solving approach is truly awe-inspiring.

I always like when a new video is out ❤

Uploading an hour long video at my local 4am is cruelty 😢

Incredibly entertaining! Your way of showing your work and workflow is inspiring

Nice to see you shouting out Freya's incredible video on Béziers, it's such an incredibly well done explanation and visualization :)

hell, yeah! this is gonna be awesome

I love how in depth this video is. It’s even more in depth than my college courses. Rasterization is usually very brief without going into all the edge cases.

"there's no way there's 1 hour and 10 minutes worth of text rendering stuff" said I, clueless of all the interesting intricacies of rendering fonts. Absolutely loved the video

Congrats for the video once more! It might not be too visual as the others but it’s content and how you explain it it’s gold. My field it’s marketing but I just love your videos and I could spend all the day watching them!❤️ Thanks for the effort you put in them, there are no longer channels like yours

Woke, boke, and now I see there's a new Coding Adventure! Great Start to the Weekend

When I saw the title, I didn't pay attention to the length of the video until I found out that he really planned to start talking about parsing file formats. More than an hour!

Your way of visualizing complex mathematics is really next level! The way you are able to explain quite complex formulas and make them understandable ... Top notch content thank you so much!!

I love the animations/visualizations, thank you for putting that much effort into them

I found this 10 minutes after it was posted. The video is an hour long. But there's already people commenting how great of a video it was. Sebastian should do a video about THAT phenomena.

Bytecode instructions? HOW DID NOONE TELL ME FONTS ARE A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE??????

Another sentence along the same lines as "The quick brown fox ..." that uses all the letters, which I really like is: "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." If I recall correctly, it was first coined by H. P. Lovecraft. Didn't know about the disco one though, so that's cool as now I know of at least three.

I've been watching your videos for years now and it feels like every time I watch one of your videos I actually learn something. Recently, I came into an issue about doing point-rectangle collisions at arbitrary angles. This video has given me so much inspiration on how to tackle this daunting issue. Thank you so much for all the years of inspiration and motivation down my path into computer science. I wouldn't be nearly as far as I am today without you.

A seriously long and detailed research about various techniques

WE'RE IN FOR ANOTHER HOUR OF A BANGER VIDEO BOIS!

My God man! This is the best educational video I have ever seen! I can't imagine how much time you needed to study all those papers, find what is patented, implement everything and then on top of it all make such an amazing video about the whole thing. You just instantly got one more supporter. Keep up the great work!

This is awesome! I remember experimenting with text rendering (only using bitmap rendering) and it was quite a rabbit hole with very little simple documentation. It was so satisfying to finally see hello world rendering in a window. As always, the explanation in this video is excellent.

Awesome shout-out for Freya's videos. I feel like those two videos alone could kick off a graphic programming career, absolutely in awe

I don't know why am watching this but I know this does not fit into my brain.

I have similar experiences when I developed a project. It is amazing that you can record this process so clearly and concisely in such an enjoyable way. Admire!

Love your videos. Really amazing work, they are really calming and peaceful and you always get to learn about a new and interesting topic.

My favorite subject covered by my favorite UKpostsr! I have dabbled with text rendering for months and I was familiar with much of what you do here, but I still learned new stuff. One thing to note is the pesky J that refuses to behave: the reason it probably cones out right when rendered by an OS, is that it probably just uses even-odd rendering: a pixel is drawn if it is inside an odd number of contours. What you do here is called non-zero rendering, where you count up if the contour is CW and down if CCW. There should be a flag in the font data telling you which method to use.

This is so beautiful. You've gone well beyond an adventure. This is an epic.

Your videos are so chill, I love what you’re doing ❤

Wow, literally yesterday I randomly remembered the channel and thought "It's been a few months, I bet Sebastian is cooking something really cool".

There is so much detail and the process is complicated, but I deeply appreciate the time you have taken to cover the topic. I've been searching on multiple websites to try and understand how the font file format works, and having such a detailed and concise video is amazing! Thanks!

Aaaaaa i wanted to watch more of this!! i was so focused on watching it for the whole hour long video, then it just ended :c awesome job, really nice video !

The work that you are putting into those videos is inspiring. Thank you.

When I saw your video, I shouted "YES" a few times and my friend was staring at me. Brother I dream of becoming a programmer as skilled as you.

this video was amazing. I really loved how this project combined so many different topics- parsing binary files, rendering, and a lot of math and problem solving. I really like how you showed the failures and how many different iterations and approaches the rendering piece went through. Fantastic video and project!

Awesome video ! You are one of the very few content creators who can release a +1h video, and I would go back to it when I have the time. Thank you for your work, and how you share it with us.

I love that you used the code you'd written to make the whacky ending. Every one of your videos is mesmerising, and I love hearing you how you tackle each problem and come up with solutions.

I love the subtle joke of making the title a series of blocks, that's a nice touch