2025 – Page 2 – Painter

Fonts, from bytes to glyphs

Download, parse, match, shape, raster. The stage that surprises people is shaping, and it is the one you cannot skip.

chrisSeptember 17, 20251 min read

The last stage of the pipeline, running on its own thread, which is exactly why transform animations survive a busy main thread.

chrisSeptember 5, 20251 min read

Every disabled check was once a good idea that fired at the wrong time. Reliability matters more than strictness.

chrisAugust 24, 20251 min read

CSS

Writing margin-inline-start instead of margin-left costs nothing today and saves a month the first time somebody asks for Arabic.

chrisAugust 12, 20251 min read

The bug report says "it gets slow after a few hours". That is a leak, and the heap snapshot will name it.

chrisJuly 31, 20251 min read

Four numbers, one trend line each, and a decision about whether to move the tripwire. That is the whole meeting.

chrisJuly 19, 20251 min read

Kilobytes are the cheapest part. The expensive part arrives eighteen months later, on a Friday.

chrisJuly 7, 20251 min read