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Making Maps Readable: A Dive into Font Rendering in Navara
.ical
2026-09-01 –, Ran2

Rendering dynamic map typography is notoriously difficult. Standard engines rely on pre-baked PBF glyphs, breaking complex text shaping (like Arabic), and making custom fonts hard to use. This talk explores these pitfalls and reveals how Navara abandons PBFs entirely.

This presentation is a technical journey into the architecture of map engine typography, contrasting industry-standard methods with Navara’s approach.

The talk is structured in the following parts:

  • The Problem (Why Map Text is Hard): A quick look at the unique constraints of GIS typography, why map text is uniquely difficult compared to standard UI text
  • Text Rendering: A quick crash course on text rendering in general to keep everyone engaged in the following sections.
  • The PBF Paradigm: We will break down how standard map engines render text.
  • The Navara Solution: We will pop the hood on Navara's rendering engine to show how we bypassed the PBF approach entirely.
Level of technical complexity: 2 - intermediate I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
The speaker’s profile picture
Adel Refaat Ali Mohamed Elnahas

Adel is a software engineer based in Egypt, with a strong focus on computer graphics.