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> 2. Google docs wants the same document to render exactly the same on all OS / browser combinations. Thats not something that web browsers guarantee. Nor is i

> 2. Google docs wants the same document to render exactly the same on all OS / browser combinations. Thats not something that web browsers guarantee. Nor is it something Google Docs guarantees, since it still uses the browser for font shaping and rendering. The easiest way to demonstrate this is in Firefox, Settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above, and Google Docs will layout and render the entire document using only your default font (most likely a serif). Not even doing a serif/sans-serif/monospace generic font fallback. (I’ve had that unticked for almost a year and a half now: it makes the web so much better on average, with minimal damage, almost all on Google properties due to their Material Icons font’s stupid ligation technique.)

josephg 3y ago
Ok, sure - you got me. If you mess with obscure browser options, you will successfully change how google docs renders content. But I suspect all of the people who select that option would fit in one meeting room, with a sign out front from google which says "WONTFIX". One thing people do do all the time in word processors is mash enter until the next bit of content ends up at the top of the following page. If a user does that, then they print their document from a different computer, it should print correctly. The next content should appear exactly at the top of the next page. If the word processor does anything else, users will be frustrated and blame the software. Word and Docs both put in a ton of engineering effort to get this right. (Educated users will insert a page break instead, but plenty of users don't know about page breaks. They still expect their documents to render correctly.)
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  I select that merely as the easiest way of demonstrating that it’s leaving important parts of its layout to the browser—parts that are not always consistent. There will be places where browsers in their default configurations differ, especially over time, to do with things like varying Unicode support or exotic OpenType shaping features, or even simple hinting. They won’t often be as big and flashy, but they’ll cause differences that may matter and added or removed lines from time to time.
  - josephg 3y ago
    > There will be places where browsers in their default configurations differ, especially over time, to do with things like varying Unicode support or exotic OpenType shaping features, or even simple hinting. And my point is simply that google docs is explicitly designed to prevent any of these sort of issues from being noticable to the user. Sure, maybe individual characters or words will render slightly differently due to type hints. But as I understand it, google tries to make sure it never results in an added or removed line anywhere. The only way they can make sure of that is by shipping their own text layout engine. And hence the use of canvas to render text.
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
      > And my point is simply that google docs is explicitly designed to prevent any of these sort of issues from being noticable to the user. I’ve demonstrated one place where it very obviously failed at this goal, and I know enough about variation in shaping to confidently state that others do exist, though the most obvious are almost entirely historical. But there are variations that can change glyph advance, which will affect layout. They use the browser’s shaping, so they’re subject to its quirks. In order to obtain absolutely consistent layout, they’d need to do the shaping themselves, but they have chosen not to do that (and I think they’re right not to). Google Docs has clearly been pushing for non-pagination in more recent times, and paragraph layout largely doesn’t matter once you’re not fussing about pagination. They reimplemented breaking paragraphs into lines, but gained literally nothing thereby in terms of actual functionality or behaviour, since the browser offers absolutely everything they wanted from it, and they still rely on the browser for the shaping.

josephg 3y ago

Ok, sure - you got me. If you mess with obscure browser options, you will successfully change how google docs renders content. But I suspect all of the people who select that option would fit in one meeting room, with a sign out front from google which says "WONTFIX". One thing people do do all the time in word processors is mash enter until the next bit of content ends up at the top of the following page. If a user does that, then they print their document from a different computer, it should print correctly. The next content should appear exactly at the top of the next page. If the word processor does anything else, users will be frustrated and blame the software. Word and Docs both put in a ton of engineering effort to get this right. (Educated users will insert a page break instead, but plenty of users don't know about page breaks. They still expect their documents to render correctly.)

chrismorgan 3y ago
I select that merely as the easiest way of demonstrating that it’s leaving important parts of its layout to the browser—parts that are not always consistent. There will be places where browsers in their default configurations differ, especially over time, to do with things like varying Unicode support or exotic OpenType shaping features, or even simple hinting. They won’t often be as big and flashy, but they’ll cause differences that may matter and added or removed lines from time to time.
- josephg 3y ago
  > There will be places where browsers in their default configurations differ, especially over time, to do with things like varying Unicode support or exotic OpenType shaping features, or even simple hinting. And my point is simply that google docs is explicitly designed to prevent any of these sort of issues from being noticable to the user. Sure, maybe individual characters or words will render slightly differently due to type hints. But as I understand it, google tries to make sure it never results in an added or removed line anywhere. The only way they can make sure of that is by shipping their own text layout engine. And hence the use of canvas to render text.
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    > And my point is simply that google docs is explicitly designed to prevent any of these sort of issues from being noticable to the user. I’ve demonstrated one place where it very obviously failed at this goal, and I know enough about variation in shaping to confidently state that others do exist, though the most obvious are almost entirely historical. But there are variations that can change glyph advance, which will affect layout. They use the browser’s shaping, so they’re subject to its quirks. In order to obtain absolutely consistent layout, they’d need to do the shaping themselves, but they have chosen not to do that (and I think they’re right not to). Google Docs has clearly been pushing for non-pagination in more recent times, and paragraph layout largely doesn’t matter once you’re not fussing about pagination. They reimplemented breaking paragraphs into lines, but gained literally nothing thereby in terms of actual functionality or behaviour, since the browser offers absolutely everything they wanted from it, and they still rely on the browser for the shaping.