The Font Backends

WebKitGTK+ currently supports a single font backend which uses Fontconfig for selection, Freetype for rasterization, and Harfbuzz for complex text shaping. We recently switched from supporting an optional Pango-based backend. Now the "Freetype" backend is the only one available.

Remaining font bugs

There are still some font bugs remaining. Here's a list to help us keep track of them:

• ​if font-family lists several generic families, the last one takes precedence
• ​GTK: fast/text/font-kerning.html fails
• ​WebKit freetype backend doesn't support "locl" tables
• ​CPU spikes when rendering, spending time loading compressed pcf fonts
• ​freetype port: font fallback mechanism can try harder *