On Thu, 2016-03-03 at 13:44 +0000, Michael Meeks wrote: > Hi guys, > Anyhow - what to do ? > > While we could switch to DirectWrite on windows, which may > solve some > of our problems; this will be in itself disruptive. > > So - I believe that we should switch to using harfbuzz and > freetype consistently everywhere.
So, like chromium and firefox etc do, I'm very much in favor of using our harfbuzz text shaper on all platforms to unify that complexity and have equal layout problems on different platforms :-). If you look at the vcl/unx/generic/glyphs/gcach_layout.cxx getFontFuncs thing (and the firefox equivalents) then harfbuzz has mechanisms to allow us to integrate with CGFontRefs on MacOSX, FT_Face under Linux and presumably (?) hook into our existing Windows stuff to swap out the two windows shaping engines and keep (one of) the existing render paths ? So layout wise I'm comfortable with harfbuzz everywhere. Window text rendering is as clear as mud to me though. Right now under Linux (and similar platforms) at the moment we are using cairo to render glyphs (from freetype faces) rather that using freetype to do that directly. And under Linux we render visually differently, albeit with the same positioning, depending on what features of the underlying freetype are enabled or disabled and all mediated by what desktop-wide font options are set. My experiences there suggests that if your text doesn't look like everyone else's on that platform there's constant moaning and complaining. On Windows, peer apps like firefox and chromium etc seem to follow the pattern of eventually rendering their harfbuzz layouted text with the DirectWrite apis, whether directly, or through skia or through a forked cairo, that *seems* be where things end up. So that seems to be a fairly well trodden route. C. _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
