“Since you have experience with that, maybe you can tell me how big a project that might end up being?”
Here is about how much time I spent on the typography library: * Load SVG fonts and render font (simplest font format) - couple hours * Rasterization font - a day or two * Load TTF font - a day or two * Typesetting - a day or two * Sub Pixeling - a day or two * CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and UTF stuff - couple of hours Stuff still not done: * OTF loading - estimate a day or two * RTL - estimate couple of hours * Emoji - estimate a day or two (requires mini SVG renderer) * Shaping Engine - probably a week for basic stuff * Other OTF font features, full matrix here: ([https://ilovetypography.com/OpenType/opentype-features.html](https://ilovetypography.com/OpenType/opentype-features.html)) - probably months, but not all features are needed, I don’t think anyone implements them all. * More complex typesetting and word wrap ([http://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/articles/typography/linebreak.en](http://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/articles/typography/linebreak.en)) It boils down to how many language you want to support. It’s easy to get to alphabet based languages, CJK is hard because of shear number of characters as you can’t load the font into memory. At this point you got like 95% of languages covered. Then it gets into right-to-left and the shaping engine and the last 5% of languages are really hard like Arabic, Hebrew, Tibetan. Typesetting them is also hard and not a solved problem. For Thai, Lao, and Khmer you can’t wrap it properly without having AI read and understand the language. No one really supports vertical languages like Mongolian, and even though CJK can be vertical it’s never like that on digital devices. You kind of have to do it language by language basis.
