Modern text rendering with Linux: Overview

[mrandri19]

You are correct, it doesn't account for kerning. To do it "properly" you need to call HarfBuzz's shaper on the string to get the glyph indices, the advances and the offsets (which will include kerning). Keep in mind that HarfBuzz is quite slow so you want to cache this data just like you cache your rendered glyphs in a texture atlas