Luca Furini wrote:
I am still thinking about justification and the more general problem of line-breaking, and I have come to think that it's quite "strange" that the LineLayoutManager should make choices about breaking points using only the information provided by the TextLayoutManagers, while it should have a wider knowledge of all the text. (I see bug 28706 as an example of this strangeness: the LLM wants the TLM to say if there is other text after the returned BreakPoss, but the TLM doesn't know of the other TLMs' text)
bug 28706 is still a bit of mystery to me, well at least the disappearing text, as I dont have an example of it.
At the moment, lines are built one at a time, and in "normal" cases only underfull lines are taken into account: as both bpDim and availIPD have .min == .opt == .max, no BreakPoss is added to vecPossEnd and the chosen one is simply the last "short" BP returned by a TLM. Even if bpDim had .min != .max, the choice would be made between a few alternatives for the current line, without considering what will happen next; this could generate an output alternating tight and loose lines, which is not very beautiful.
So, I have tried to implement Knuth's line-breaking algorithm [1], which calculates breaking points after having gathered information about a whole paragraph. Here are a few advantages of this algorithm: - first of all, the output is very beautiful; there is not a big difference in width between spaces in consecutive lines, and the max space width is smaller than before - the interaction between LLM and TLM is quite the same; the TLM returns a different kind of objects, much smaller - the TLM code is simplified a bit, as it has no more to handle leading spaces, or calculate flags (which IMO are rather line-related than text-related) - the LLM now can quite easily handle properties such as text-indent, text-align-last, word-spacing and letter-spacing
Could I open a bugzilla issue and attach a patch? It would be quite a raw patch, as I took some short cuts to make it work and there could be some useless variables, anyway it works and could be used to show the quality of the output. I have tested it with text-only blocks, so I don't know what could happen in more complex situations.
this sounds like a really good idea, and would be very pleased if you could open a new bug in bugzilla and attach your patch. It will probably need a lengthy review involving plenty of testing and cleaning up.
Chris
