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.
