Hi Michael, you write: > Having looked at this heap; and worse - the two different heaps for > Windows text rendering, and also the big pile of strange cross-platform > issues with stacking diacritics, emojis etc. I'm pretty convinced that > we cannot do a good job of consistent text shaping and/or rendering > cross-platform while using the Windows font rendering infrastructure. > Yeah, I suppose. But that alone won't fix the kind of issues you show in your ascii art - as long as so much low-level layouting is still happening in Writer (dx arrays, kashida filling etc).
> While we could switch to DirectWrite on windows, which may solve some > of our problems; this will be in itself disruptive. > Incidentally - why that? > So - I believe that we should switch to using harfbuzz and freetype > consistently everywhere. This would have the huge benefit of precise > cross-platform font rendering and metric fidelity, give us a font and > shaping stack that is fully introspectable, drop some legacy Windows API > usage, and allow all development work and fixing on all platforms to > share the same underlying code. > I think that promise cannot be kept. Let's evaluate the merit of switching to some truly great floss libraries based on other aspects - you're not even getting consistent floating point math between different CPUs, let alone different operating systems... > There will of course also be some corner-cases where we may simply not > be able to replicate the tangled old layout behaviour - which is > (anyway) inconsistent across platforms - but - I think this is a one-off > risk that is well worth taking to get us to a fully consistent, Free > Software rendering stack. It is interesting that Microsoft also used freetype > for their Office / Mac rendering in the recent past =) > Oh - got some reference for that? Since I guess for most complaints about layouting problems I hear about, it's the different between MSO and LibreOffice, rather than between LibreOffice on different platforms. ;) Cheers, -- Thorsten
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