alt Hacker News> Just so you have an idea for how a typical text-rendering pipeline works, here’s a quick sketch:
1. Styling (parse markup, query system for fonts)
2. Layout (break text into lines)
3. Shaping (compute the glyphs in a line and their positions)
4. Rasterization (rasterize needed glyphs into an atlas/cache)
5. Composition (copy glyphs from the atlas to their desired positions)
Why is layout done so early? It seems to me that that would be later in the process.
An example: the text "Hello There إلا بسم الله Beep Boop!!" should turn into two visual lines as follows if it is line-wrapped:
Notice how "إلا" goes from the fifth word (from left to right) to the third after the line wrap. This won't work if shaping happens before line wrapping.