Figma files for proposed IPO

Post by Mossy9 » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:38 AM UTC

stevage wrote: post #83

zdragnar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been fighting the way figma interprets fonts for years. It's not too bad at my current company, but at my last company things would look great in figma but with the exact same styles applied they'd be wrong in every browser. That's the sort of thing people are complaining about here. I'm sure there's something fundamentally wrong with the font files. In both cases, they're not standard, widely available fonts. W…

My solution in these cases was to build prototype sites that sync in real time from the figma file. So the designer can see how their work actually looks, and treat the figma view as just a low fidelity preview.

Post by once_inc » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:42 AM UTC

Post by marhee » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 6:44 AM UTC

poiru wrote: post #115

rudi-c wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Font rendering is indeed complex, but the anecdote seems to be misleading readers into thinking Evan wrote obscure code. I worked extensively in the parts of the Figma where Evan wrote a lot of foundational code, and have also worked directly with him on building the plugin API. One of Evan's strong points as a CTO is that he was very pragmatic and that was reflected in his code. Things that could be simple were simp…

+1 from another Figma engineer who happened to work on the text engine back in the day. I think that Evan generally wrote code that was as simple as possible — there was no unnecessary complexity. In this case there indeed is some inherent, unavoidable complexity due to the math involved and the performance requirements, but otherwise I found our text rendering pipeline very understandable. Evan actually wrote about…

Post by ChadNauseam » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 7:01 AM UTC

lompad wrote: post #129

habosa wrote: post #110

So much negativity in this thread. I thought we’d be able to celebrate this one. Figma provided an alternative to the evil Adobe empire that was actually better. It’s powered by some amazing tech built originally by one of the founders. It’s still got a generous free plan. I’m happy the employees will get to cash out.

[flagged]

Post by poiru » Wed, Jul 02, 2025, 7:15 AM UTC

marhee wrote: post #135

poiru wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 from another Figma engineer who happened to work on the text engine back in the day. I think that Evan generally wrote code that was as simple as possible — there was no unnecessary complexity. In this case there indeed is some inherent, unavoidable complexity due to the math involved and the performance requirements, but otherwise I found our text rendering pipeline very understandable. Evan actually wrote about…

It’s a clever trick. But can it render a textured text? Transparent text, gradient fills? Maybe it can, I dont know. But why not just triangulate the glyph shapes, and represent each glyph as a set of triangles. This triangulation can be done offline, making rendering very lightweight.