5 ms·

I've actually just started using Notion and the UI is nice, as is the feature set, but yeah, I'm getting a little annoyed by the constant page loads. I mean th

by movedx 6y ago

I've actually just started using Notion and the UI is nice, as is the feature set, but yeah, I'm getting a little annoyed by the constant page loads. I mean this kind of thing continues to fuel my beliefs that software is going backwards here because frankly, how hard can it be to render some text?

jfim 6y ago
> how hard can it be to render some text? It really depends. If the only thing you care about rendering is US ASCII with a monospace bitmapped font, that's not too hard. However, a general purpose text renderer will have to handle things like directionality (left to right versus right to left text orientation), wide/half text rendering (for CJK characters), combining characters (for some European, South East Asian languages, and zalgo), line break rules (handling characters like soft hyphens and non breaking spaces), and so on. On the font rendering side of things, there's kerning (some letters are closer to one another), font ligatures (certain fonts handle things like fi ffi fl ffl differently, not to mention things like hasklig), antialiasing, sub pixel rendering, and the fact that fonts are actually programs running on a stack based virtual machine [0]. That's also ignoring more advanced text rendering features like ruby characters and vertical text rendering. Or that apparently Turkish has different small caps than English ones [1]. In practice, it's probably not the text rendering that's the issue, it's probably just features that are implemented inefficiently. [0] https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM03/Chap3.html#font_program https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/ttochap1#opentype-layout-terminology https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/tt...
- capableweb 6y ago
  "how hard can it be to render some text" as the previous author is a valid complaint, if Notion only rendered text but they do not. There is a lot of data structures around what looks like "just text", including images and everything else. I agree that Notion has big performance problems, and I myself left it for logseq a long time ago just because of the performance issues and the non-flexible architecture overall. But Notion's performance issues are not about rendering text, it's rendering everything but text.
- barry27 6y ago
  right. its probably nothing to do with text rendering. the vast majority of your response was orthogonal nonsense. par for the course here on HN.
- isitdopamine 6y ago
  All of this can be done quite efficiently on a native widget. The problem with Notion is that it uses Electron.
  - Griffinsauce 6y ago
    Which makes rendering text extremely simple. It's a fun meme to blame Electron for everything but the problems with Notion are obviously with its state and data management. Booting/rendering performance is not the bottleneck here, and having used lightning fast Electron apps, I'm sure it never will be. Put differently: what measurements do you have of the performance issues of Notion and is Electron performance the root problem of them?
    - isitdopamine 6y ago
      Let’s just say that the fact that Electron needs to allocate hundreds of MB in memory to display a single “Hello world” text does not depose in Electron’s favor. Compare it with the few MBs needed by an equivalent native app with exactly same functionality. By any standard and by any metric, Electron is bloated. Some applications (like VSCode) can disguise it quite well and give a an acceptable user experience.
      - Griffinsauce 6y ago
        Apart from the notion (heh) that we should compare a hello world app to determine real world performance, memory usage is really not that relevant to the discussion of speed, responsiveness etc. There is a level of optimization where that is relevant and it's relevant in a bigger context of responsible resource usage but that's not what we're talking about here. This was exactly my point as to the "memes" of Electron criticisms, your point is completely off topic but because someone mentioned "Notion" someone has to make your point nearly verbatim every time. It does not add anything valuable to the discussion. Talking about caching strategies, offline/online functionality and layout thrashing is much, much more interesting here.
      - mr-karan 6y ago
- kuschku 6y ago
  Not just small caps – turkish has different case mapping for iİ ıI vs the ascii mapping iI. There’s also situations like German, where, until 2017, a single lower case letter could map to two upper-case letters (but they wouldn’t map back to that single lower-case letter): toUpper(ß) == SS, toLower(S) == s, toLower(SS) == ss, toLower(toUpper(ß)) != ß (Since 2017 that’s been fixed, although not adopted by every publication or software yet, by using ẞ. toUpper(ß) == ẞ, toLower(ẞ) == ß, toLower(toUpper(ß)) == ẞ)
scq 6y ago
I'm sure it was a lot snappier when I started using it, but it has been getting quite slow over the past couple of years. Really makes me want a lightweight alternative because I love its editing model.
- movedx 6y ago
  I honestly think I'll just use Vim, a "~/notes" directory and my already powerful file searching functionality built into Vim (fzf powered I think it's called)

by movedx 6y ago

jfim 6y ago

> how hard can it be to render some text? It really depends. If the only thing you care about rendering is US ASCII with a monospace bitmapped font, that's not too hard. However, a general purpose text renderer will have to handle things like directionality (left to right versus right to left text orientation), wide/half text rendering (for CJK characters), combining characters (for some European, South East Asian languages, and zalgo), line break rules (handling characters like soft hyphens and non breaking spaces), and so on. On the font rendering side of things, there's kerning (some letters are closer to one another), font ligatures (certain fonts handle things like fi ffi fl ffl differently, not to mention things like hasklig), antialiasing, sub pixel rendering, and the fact that fonts are actually programs running on a stack based virtual machine [0]. That's also ignoring more advanced text rendering features like ruby characters and vertical text rendering. Or that apparently Turkish has different small caps than English ones [1]. In practice, it's probably not the text rendering that's the issue, it's probably just features that are implemented inefficiently. [0] https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM03/Chap3.html#font_program https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/ttochap1#opentype-layout-terminology https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/tt...

capableweb 6y ago
"how hard can it be to render some text" as the previous author is a valid complaint, if Notion only rendered text but they do not. There is a lot of data structures around what looks like "just text", including images and everything else. I agree that Notion has big performance problems, and I myself left it for logseq a long time ago just because of the performance issues and the non-flexible architecture overall. But Notion's performance issues are not about rendering text, it's rendering everything but text.
barry27 6y ago
right. its probably nothing to do with text rendering. the vast majority of your response was orthogonal nonsense. par for the course here on HN.
isitdopamine 6y ago
All of this can be done quite efficiently on a native widget. The problem with Notion is that it uses Electron.
- Griffinsauce 6y ago
  Which makes rendering text extremely simple. It's a fun meme to blame Electron for everything but the problems with Notion are obviously with its state and data management. Booting/rendering performance is not the bottleneck here, and having used lightning fast Electron apps, I'm sure it never will be. Put differently: what measurements do you have of the performance issues of Notion and is Electron performance the root problem of them?
  - isitdopamine 6y ago
    Let’s just say that the fact that Electron needs to allocate hundreds of MB in memory to display a single “Hello world” text does not depose in Electron’s favor. Compare it with the few MBs needed by an equivalent native app with exactly same functionality. By any standard and by any metric, Electron is bloated. Some applications (like VSCode) can disguise it quite well and give a an acceptable user experience.
    - Griffinsauce 6y ago
      Apart from the notion (heh) that we should compare a hello world app to determine real world performance, memory usage is really not that relevant to the discussion of speed, responsiveness etc. There is a level of optimization where that is relevant and it's relevant in a bigger context of responsible resource usage but that's not what we're talking about here. This was exactly my point as to the "memes" of Electron criticisms, your point is completely off topic but because someone mentioned "Notion" someone has to make your point nearly verbatim every time. It does not add anything valuable to the discussion. Talking about caching strategies, offline/online functionality and layout thrashing is much, much more interesting here.
    - mr-karan 6y ago
kuschku 6y ago
Not just small caps – turkish has different case mapping for iİ ıI vs the ascii mapping iI. There’s also situations like German, where, until 2017, a single lower case letter could map to two upper-case letters (but they wouldn’t map back to that single lower-case letter): toUpper(ß) == SS, toLower(S) == s, toLower(SS) == ss, toLower(toUpper(ß)) != ß (Since 2017 that’s been fixed, although not adopted by every publication or software yet, by using ẞ. toUpper(ß) == ẞ, toLower(ẞ) == ß, toLower(toUpper(ß)) == ẞ)

scq 6y ago

I'm sure it was a lot snappier when I started using it, but it has been getting quite slow over the past couple of years. Really makes me want a lightweight alternative because I love its editing model.

movedx 6y ago
I honestly think I'll just use Vim, a "~/notes" directory and my already powerful file searching functionality built into Vim (fzf powered I think it's called)