Wookash Podcast Jimmy Lefevre | The Ridiculous World of Text
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Aug 16, 2025 In this engaging discussion, Jimmy Lefevre, a talented programmer in the EDA industry and creator of kb_text_shape, dives into the complexities of text rendering and encoding. He shares his journey from gaming aspirations to programming, critiquing traditional computer science education. The conversation touches on bi-directional text processing, the challenges of building a text shaping library for languages like Arabic, and the cultural perceptions of work in France. Lefevre's insights on open-source versus paid software in font creation are thought-provoking!
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Handmade Hero Fueled Deep Learning
- Jimmy learned programming by obsessively following Handmade Hero and coding along, which beat his university classes for depth.
- He built a chess engine and learned bit-level thinking that shaped his low-level programming style.
Code Points Versus Encodings
- Unicode defines abstract code points but leaves memory representation to encodings like UTF-8 or UTF-32.
- Shaping and higher text algorithms operate on decoded code points, so decoding is a required preprocessing step.
From Bitmaps To Vector Outlines
- Fonts moved from bitmaps to scalable outlines using Bezier curves and ray casting for rasterization.
- This allowed smooth scaling and preserved glyph geometry across resolutions.