+1 from another Figma engineer who happened to work on the text engine back in the day.
I think that Evan generally wrote code that was as simple as possible β there was no unnecessary complexity. In this case there indeed is some inherent, unavoidable complexity due to the math involved and the performance requirements, but otherwise I found our text rendering pipeline very understandable.
Itβs a clever trick. But can it render a textured text? Transparent text, gradient fills? Maybe it can, I dont know. But why not just triangulate the glyph shapes, and represent each glyph as a set of triangles. This triangulation can be done offline, making rendering very lightweight.
The linked post was about Evan's side project, but within Figma, all of that is indeed possible. The glyphs are transformed into vector networks[0], which has a fill pipeline that supports transparency, gradients, images, blending, masking, etc.
I think that Evan generally wrote code that was as simple as possible β there was no unnecessary complexity. In this case there indeed is some inherent, unavoidable complexity due to the math involved and the performance requirements, but otherwise I found our text rendering pipeline very understandable.
Evan actually wrote about it if you're curious to learn more: https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering...