These glyphs are indeed defined in terms of vector paths (quadratic or cubic Bezier splines depending on the font format), but it’s rarely a good idea to direct

These glyphs are indeed defined in terms of vector paths (quadratic or cubic Bezier splines depending on the font format), but it’s rarely a good idea to directly render these shapes to display text. Performance optimizations mentioned in the other comments is not the sole reason. Another one is visual quality. Direct rendering of these vector glyphs would look good on high DPI displays and/or for very large font sizes. For normal-looking text on typical displays you won’t achieve great results without hinting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting Another quality related problem is subpixel rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering Just like hinting, hard to solve while directly rendering vector shapes.