Having discussed the challenge of text layout/rendering yesterday, & reboosted some jokes about it: What all is involved?
In GNOME's stack we use FontConfig to lookup fonts for a particular style, Pango to split lines, FriBidi to normalize text direction, LibICU to find split points, FreeType to parse fonts in a wide variety of formats, Harfbuzz to size runs of text positioning "glyphs" within it, & Cairo (or OpenGL) to composite those glyphs onscreen.
In my hypothetical hardware I split the test between multiple circuits!
I described some preprocessing (including normalizing text dir) in a circuit well-suited to most text processing (parse & rearrange!). The same circuit would parse fonts.
I described a 2nd circuit to position text within the constraints of their containing blocks, fast at running-sums. And a 3rd for compositing results onscreen. Combine them to rasterize vectors.
Early IRL hardware only handled monospaced English!
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