demo · v133
Glyph render probe — what Fontations now handles
Chrome 133 swapped FreeType for the Fontations Rust libraries (Skrifa, Read-Fonts) for font shaping and rasterisation. Visually identical — that's the point — but here are five glyphs that historically exercised the C++ stack's edge cases. Inspect them and time the render.
specimen — large Joan serif (showcases hinting & subpixel)
why a Rust font stack matters
FreeType is C, decades old, and a high-value attack surface because the browser parses any font URL the page provides — PDF documents and image MIME spoofers have used font CVEs since the early 2000s. Fontations is the Google Fonts team's Rust replacement: Skrifa for rasterisation, Read-Fonts for parsing, Klippa for subsetting. Same visual output (the Rust libraries reproduce FreeType's hinting), memory-safe by construction. Chrome 133 wires Fontations into the renderer.