UTW 2026

Tutorial
Fonts

Demystifying Unicode Text Display: From Unicode Code Points to Positioned Glyphs

Peter Constable, Ned Holbrook

on  Day2, 14:00in  for  90min

This session offers a practical overview of how Unicode text turns into what we see on screen. We will unravel the complex steps involved in displaying a single line of text, including font selection and fallback, bidi, shaping, glyph substitution, and more. Attendees will come away with a better understanding of Unicode and of text display behaviours that affect user experiences across languages. The talk is aimed primarily for i18n engineers, localizers, and will also be beneficial for beginning font engineers.

 Overview  Program