> They handle specific subsets of text rendering across a wide range of languages.
People radically overstate how hard this is. Yes there’s a lot of cases. But God bless UTF-8 which provides a very clear path.
There are countless hobby text editors and libraries that handle literally all of this.
> I can't imagine implementing a screen reader without relying heavily on the OS....
Of course. You “just” need to use the documented OS APIs. It’s not trivial. But like it’s not that hard to use the APIs that lots of programs and libraries already use.
> But God bless UTF-8 which provides a very clear path.
It's a very clear middle finger for CJK users if text rendering issues were dismissed because "we do UTF-8." Thanks to the Unicode Consortium, letters from CJK languages have shared code points in Unicode. This makes it very easy to have, for example, Chinese style fonts sprinkled over Japanese text. This kind of mixed styles are aesthetically inconsistent, unpleasant, and hard to read.
People radically overstate how hard this is. Yes there’s a lot of cases. But God bless UTF-8 which provides a very clear path.
There are countless hobby text editors and libraries that handle literally all of this.
> I can't imagine implementing a screen reader without relying heavily on the OS....
Of course. You “just” need to use the documented OS APIs. It’s not trivial. But like it’s not that hard to use the APIs that lots of programs and libraries already use.