GSoC 2026 : Text Node improvement and other typography supports

[Annonnymmousss]

About

My name is Jatin (aka Bunny) (@Annonnymmousss ) and I will be working on the "Improvement of text node and adding new text attributes to improve typography" as my GSoC 2026 project.

Synopsis

The goal of the project is to improve the existing implementation of the text node in Graphite and add new text attributes to improve typography.

Deliverables

• Add support for rendering list<string> directly as raw paths.
• Split the current text node into two different nodes: Text (just creates a List<String> that applies the given text and typographic/styling attributes) and Text to Vector which vectorizes it(list<vector>).
• Migrating the SVG foreignObject HTML-based interactive text editing(browser based) with our own custom text entry feature (Rust Backend).
• Implement style spans with the new data model.
• Add new text attributes to improve typography.

Final Report

My project aimed to improve the performance of existing text node and add new text attributes. It separate the existing text node which use to take string as input and returns list<vector> as result into two different nodes. It aimed to migrate the existing browser based text editing to graphite's own rust backend. It aimed to introduce style spans and other text attributes.

Contributions

Code Changes: +2144 -500

Rendering of raw paths as list<strings>

• Add String[] as a graphic type for typography #4141
  Added rendering support for list<string> into the Vello and SVG renderer which would read the attributes for the font information and other font properties and directly render it as raw paths instead of ever becoming vector (list<vector>)as rendering directly is raw path is much faster than rendering as vectors. This tremendously improves performance while rendering large text and avoid the lag behaviour which occurs while rendering vectors.

Screen.Recording.2026-08-24.at.3.36.08.PM.mov

Splitting of text node

• Add String[] as a graphic type for typography #4141
  Split the previous text node which use to take raw strings as input and return it after vectorising it in the form of list<vector> into two new nodes:
  • Text node which takes raw string as input and return it as raw paths in the form of newly created graphical type list<string> which drastically improves the performance for rendering large text.
  • Text to vector node which takes list<string> as an input and vectorizes it and return it in the form of graphical type list<vector> so that rendering of rendering of list<string> to improve performance don't bottleneck the vector art.

After splitting the node migrate all the text parameters of old text node to the two newly created text nodes.

600660063-9c4c4396-81c1-4063-9c4a-33c320d5b7bc.mov

Style Spans

Researched on triviality of adding style spans with the help of Parley. I tested it on different examples like doubling the font size alternatively and alternatively changing colour of words within the same text box to demonstrate the style spans. Parley provide API for adding style spans to the texts. This will be implemented after the introduction of the new data model.

618527705-1b57891b-4164-4bff-b685-15a4d14b5782.mov

Migrating browser based text editing entirely to rust backend.

• Migrate Text Editing to rust backend #4316
  Replace Graphite's old text-editing approach, which relied on an HTML <textarea> overlaid on the canvas via SVG foreignObject, with a fully native text-editing system implemented in the Rust backend. Cursor movement, text selection, double/triple-click word and line selection, and undo/redo history and other editing behaviour are now handled directly by the editor core instead of the browser's DOM, using the Parley for rendering. There are few bottlenecks currently like IEM related features such as grammatical underlining, use of characters like à, etc.

Screen.Recording.2026-07-14.at.3.00.47.PM.mov

Text Hyphenation

• Add hyphenation #4018
  Researched on implementation of hyphenation which is currently a limitation of parley that they doesn't provide API for its addition so we planned to use hyphenation crate for the breaking points(basically the dictionary for different languages) and then inserting the - at breaks. Similarly researched on breaking of URLs like https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite/...... and numerical value which consists of units with them like 1000m or 10px, all these has a particular style of line breaking.
  [Not implemented as of now just the mvp is raised]

Screen.Recording.2026-04-09.at.1.49.49.AM.mov

575607790-9c709dd5-a188-491a-a0ba-de790a47905e.mov

What's left to do

Migration of text editing to rust backend is yet to merge. It is yet to decide the approach to show the blink of cursor. Style spans triviality have been explored but yet to implement fully and will be implemented only finalising the data model. The research and mvp of text attributes, hyphenation which is not implemented yet due to unavailability of API in parley have been done and landed but the final merge is in hault. Other attribute research has been performed and discussed.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank @Keavon for his guidance, thoughtful feedback, and extensive help throughout the project. I am also grateful to the Graphite community and Google Summer of Code for providing the opportunity and support that made this work possible.

[Annonnymmousss]

Progress

Community Bonding - Week 1

• (Add String[] as a graphic type for typography #4141 )

• Added rendering support for list<string> into the vello and svg renderer which would read the attributes for the font information and other font properties and directly render it as raw paths instead of ever becoming vector as rendering directly is raw path is much faster than rendering as vectors.

591363954-06d1beab-4944-4243-96d3-cd74b343bf05.mov

• Split the existing text node which render the string into vector into two separate nodes: Text (just creates a List<String> that applies the given text and typographic/styling attributes) and Text to Vector which vectorizes it(list<vector>) and extended List<String> rendering to work with all typographic parameters currently supported through the Text node.

597370070-3f094071-8d3e-4c8d-8afb-3f4e8cc01adf.mov

[Annonnymmousss]

Week 2 - Week 4

• Finalize the PR(Add String[] as a graphic type for typography #4141) and let it to merging state.
• Ideation on style span and testing it with multiple test cases like alternate colour on different word within the text layer and the font size doubles every other word with the same layer.
• Ideation on the new data model.

Screen.Recording.2026-06-26.at.6.52.28.AM.mov

[Annonnymmousss]

Week 5 - Week 7

• Migrating the SVG foreignObject HTML-based interactive text editing with our own custom text entry feature (Rust Backend). (Migrate Text Editing to rust backend #4316 )

Screen.Recording.2026-07-08.at.6.13.07.AM.mov

[Annonnymmousss]

Week 8 - Week 10

• Add hyphenation #4018 (MVP)
• Researched on implementation of hyphenation which is currently a limitation of parley that they doesn't provide API for its addition so we planned to use hyphenation crate for the breaking points(basically the dictionary for different languages) and then inserting the -at breaks.
• Researched on breaking of URLs like https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite/...... and numerical value which consists of units with them like 1000m or 10px, all these has a particular style of line breaking.

Screen.Recording.2026-04-09.at.1.49.49.AM.mov

575607859-4b4aa206-9b40-4ec7-a83c-f0d82280b42d.mov