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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. Th

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

> 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.