!!Con 2020 - Using font shaping to put commas in big numbers EVERYWHERE!! by Tristan Hume
25Using font shaping to put commas in big numbers EVERYWHERE!! by Tristan Hume
My job involves a lot of staring at big numbers, like latencies in nanoseconds, and picking out larger magnitudes like microseconds. I got tired of counting digits in many different programs, so I decided to solve the problem in the most general way possible: with a font! OpenType font shaping allows fonts to provide all sorts of fancy rules for how they’re displayed. I’ll explain how I repurposed a feature designed for Arabic calligraphy in order to make a font that inserts fake commas between groups of three digits in large numbers everywhere!
Tristan Hume works on fast software at Jane Street. He gets captivated by funny and cool technical ideas and develops a burning desire to implement them, mostly in Rust but sometimes in OpenType font shaping rules. He writes long technical articles about things he does and finds interesting at https://thume.ca/.