[derefr]

If you really break it down, a font is just a pixel shader that happens to embed its own texture atlas.

(I wonder if we could achieve a win by actually having a font-format that is just an abstract pixel shader that could be handed off to the GPU driver for compilation? Either way, we'd probably just pre-render glyph tiles to a texture, so I'm not sure it'd make much of a difference.)

[t0astbread]

I wonder if we could achieve a win by just deprecating OpenType with its weird custom database format and having fonts be ZIP files with images and a JSON manifest (or shaders and a manifest, whatever). The manifest could contain all the meta-information and information about ligatures and kerning and so on.