A system for typographic glyph construction includes a graphics system, a glyph server coupled to the graphics system, and an operating system coupled to the glyph server. An apparatus for typographic glyph construction of input text in a graphics system running on a computer system and output on an output device of the computer system includes a line layout core unit, a glyph cache unit coupled to the line layout core unit, an open font architecture services unit coupled to the glyph cache unit, at least one scaler unit coupled to the open font architecture unit, a font object management unit coupled to the at least one font scaler, and an attribute group support unit supporting a data structure for communication among the units of the apparatus. A method for processing input text in a graphics system running on a computer system and displaying typographic glyphs on a display device of the computer system includes mapping the input text into glyph codes, forming an initial glyph record array, the initial glyph record array comprising a plurality of glyph records for the glyph codes, processing a layout of the glyph codes to produce an updated glyph record array, rendering the updated glyph record array to produce a final glyph record array, and rendering a display of the typographic glyph output from the final glyph record array.