I think it would be nice if the project came with a runable usage example. I'm imagining a source file and/or command invocation for actually producing some rendered output, assuming the dependencies are set up correctly.

Did blackboard produce the example.svg linked in the README?

The rest of this issue is an explanation for why I'm asking this, especially since I don't know anything about racket or font rendering.

I saw you complain on twitter that you project has a number of difficult to deal with dependencies. I have used nix flakes a number of times for packaging software that is very picky about dependencies. Sadly that does not mean that I can actually solve those problems in practice, because that kind of thing quickly turns into a time-sink.

Still I was interested, so I spent about an hour on this to go through the first steps of trying to package this as a flake and at document the many loose ends, based on your README.md. I don't have specific plans to actually finish this but I thought I'd still share my initial attempt. You can find my code here if you are interested: https://github.com/mschwaig/blackboard/blob/add-flake-based-build/flake.nix

Feel free to close/ignore this issue as you see fit. Thanks and be well!

IIRC Racket still ships with Pango 1.42. In July 2019 Pango 1.44 added support for fractional spacing. Roughly, fractional spacing allows glyphs to be positioned at something other than a pixel boundary, which makes the intercharacter spacing much more accurate, especially at small sizes. (This is why any text set with racket/draw looks a little janky and 1990s-ish.)

In this screen grab, the first three lines are drawn with Racket, and the fourth with a Mac OS TextEdit window:

IMHO moving Racket onto Pango 1.44 would have a hugely positive effect on racket/draw and racket/gui etc. (Of course I’m leaving aside whatever other complications might exist, since I am a one-issue voter.) Given the degree of refinement you're trying to achieve, maybe also blackboard.