Your Font File Is Secretly a Program
Two letters at `font-size: 16px` in the same browser. Different sizes. Why? Open a .ttf or .woff2 file and the answer gets stranger, fonts aren't just shapes, they're small programs that run on your CPU.
This is a closer look at what happens between you typing a string and pixels appearing on screen: the five things inside a font file, how shaping turns characters into glyphs, why "office" gets drawn as four shapes instead of six in some fonts, how rasterization and anti-aliasing fight pixel grids, and the bytecode hidden inside well-hinted fonts that runs through TrueType's virtual machine on every render.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Inside the Font File
3:11 From File to Pixel
6:41 Variable Fonts
8:03 The Layout Shift
8:59 Dont Ship Fonts You Don't Use
9:51 The Full Picture
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#webdev #frontend #typography #webperformance #css