Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
(Zain Afzal) It's impossible to do software without the power of fonts and text rendering. They underpin the terminal we use to run our code, the browsers we use to run our web apps and the emails we get paid too much to write.
But for many they are a black box of standards and code that seems to effortlessly click together, until they don't. This talk explores how this works from font file structures, internationalization issues and font stack management. Finally we use the knowledge we've gained together to poke at some non standard use cases for fonts which pull back the curtain to show a font file for what it is, arbitrary instructions on how to render a shape on the screen. Cats are involved.
pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XSXJYT
python, pycon, australia, programming, conference, technical, developers, panel, sessions, libraries, frameworks, community, sysadmins, students, education, data, science
Videos licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
PyCon AU is the national conference for the Python programming community, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast developers, sysadmins and operations folk, students, educators, scientists, statisticians, and many others besides, all with a love for working with Python.
Licensed as CC BY-NC-SA - creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Produced by Next Day Video Australia: https://nextdayvideo.com.au
Sun Sep 14 11:20:00 2025 at Ballroom 3
(Zain Afzal) It's impossible to do software without the power of fonts and text rendering. They underpin the terminal we use to run our code, the browsers we use to run our web apps and the emails we get paid too much to write.
But for many they are a black box of standards and code that seems to effortlessly click together, until they don't. This talk explores how this works from font file structures, internationalization issues and font stack management. Finally we use the knowledge we've gained together to poke at some non standard use cases for fonts which pull back the curtain to show a font file for what it is, arbitrary instructions on how to render a shape on the screen. Cats are involved.
pretalx.com/pycon-au-2025/talk/XSXJYT
python, pycon, australia, programming, conference, technical, developers, panel, sessions, libraries, frameworks, community, sysadmins, students, education, data, science
Videos licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
PyCon AU is the national conference for the Python programming community, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast developers, sysadmins and operations folk, students, educators, scientists, statisticians, and many others besides, all with a love for working with Python.
Licensed as CC BY-NC-SA - creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Produced by Next Day Video Australia: https://nextdayvideo.com.au
Sun Sep 14 11:20:00 2025 at Ballroom 3
