The Google Fonts and Chrome teams collaborate on building a new foundation for font processing. We call the new software libraries we are building “Fontations” because they are intended to form the basis for font processing across multiple open-source projects and Google products. In this talk we will show how raising the bar for software security played a big role in arriving at the decision to craft new font processing underpinnings. We will explain how Fontations was born out of desire to unify, modernize and accelerate font processing at Google. The new approach and architecture benefits both: By moving to Fontations Google Fonts accelerates their world class font production pipeline. Chrome becomes more secure for users, delivering on one of Chrome’s trademark promises as a safe browser. We lay out the modular, layered architecture of the new software libraries and we will give a demo of Chrome running on Fontations. We share our learnings from developing Python fonttools and working with FreeType and explain how these influenced our goals for and design of Fontations.
Crafting New Fontations for Chrome
