Also I think the step you feel you are missing is the one where the combining of codepoints into ligatures and laying out of text on screen is done. Google Chro

Also I think the step you feel you are missing is the one where the combining of codepoints into ligatures and laying out of text on screen is done. Google Chrome uses a library called Pango to do this IIRC. Edit: maybe it's one called Skia instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_text_layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_text_layout