[qingcharles]

Well, we started this journey with bitmap fonts that wouldn't scale up, then most computers have been Western-oriented and didn't include full character sets for most of the people living on this planet. Then it turned out to be useful to be able to render languages and glyphs from dead ancient languages. And most languages other than English use all sorts of weird combining systems and accenting. When you type English it looks just like the keys you press. But type Arabic, especially with vowels, and it looks nothing like the keys you're hitting due to all the joining.

But the real kicker was emojis which threw a real spanner in the works. Prior to this text rendering had been universally mono, but we really had to add color then.

It's really about being inclusive. Writing (historically) was always something very analog, varying wildly between people, with all sorts of unbelievably arcane rules. Tech is just finally catching up with 5,000 years of history.