7 ms·

State of Text Rendering 2024

204 points by behdad 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
KerrAvon 2y ago
making your article force a tiny, fixed, unchangeable font size seems like a good way to convince people that you should be nowhere near text rendering infrastructure
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- behdad 2y ago
  Browser zoom works fine for me. Does it not for you?
  - Findecanor 2y ago
    The page fights against zooming by reducing the text size to compensate. I can zoom in somewhat only if I press Ctrl + fast enough many times in succession, but then it is easy to overshoot.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      Interesting, when I zoom in to 300% the T in TLDR is exactly 3x taller than when at 100%. Seems to be an embedded Google Doc though so the canvas does a weird recentering jerk on viewport size changes.
      - account42 2y ago
        Zoom works until the page width is about the browser width. After that it starts fighting your zoom level.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  The author is actually one of the most prominent and respected people in this space.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- johnny22 2y ago
  actually read the very beginning where it's clear why he's using this google doc thingy which the bad text...
compressedgas 2y ago
Hinting? No.
hi_dang_ 2y ago
Nice article but sometimes I don’t know what’s worse - the state of linux audio drivers, or the state of linux text rendering. It’s very easy to see when FreeType is used because it just looks off in a few, but significant ways. I’ve used it with and without Harf. DirectWrite has been a joy by comparison.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  I never had particular issues with Linux or Windows, but I have to say that I was surprised at how bad my MacBook looks when connected to an external 1080p monitor. I know Apple wants you to buy one of their fancy high resolution monitors or whatever, but it was so odd that one with a 1920x1080 resolution would look so bad. Even toggling the hi-dpi setting in BetterDisplay didn't help much. Here's a quick picture from a few days ago: https://imgur.com/a/GLohlj1 https://imgur.com/a/GLohlj1
  - larschdk 2y ago
    I believe they don't even try to do hinting or sub-pixel rendering, where were key to Windows' crisp font rendering on low resolutions all the way back on Windows XP.
    - forgotpwd16 2y ago
      They don't indeed. Subpixel rendering was removed from macOS few years ago.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 7e 2y ago
  I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll be dead before Linux fonts look good. That’s true of many Linux features, actually. “Public” software is the quality of most public infrastructure, sadly, and smells vaguely of piss.
heftig 2y ago
I'm not sure how this gets rendered, but the lack of hinting makes it a strain to read. What irony that an article about progress in text rendering has such awful rendering quality. PS: That is in Firefox. In Chrome it uses what appears to be a bitmap font, which is much worse.
- FreeFull 2y ago
  If you click the Google Docs link at the top of the document, you can then export it to html/txt/pdf.
- maxwindiff 2y ago
  I believe this is a Google doc preview. On my iPad it had terrible scrolling performance, and the shortcut to scroll to the top of the page (tap the top edge of the screen) doesn't work :(
  - froh 2y ago
    indeed it is, as meanwhile confirmed at the top of the document.
- Lammy 2y ago
  This page breaks zoom and all scrolling keys (page up/down and space bar) in Firefox too on top of being ugly :/
  - forgotpwd16 2y ago
    I'm on Firefox and zoom/page up/down work but space doesn't. Also using own font (disabling allow pages choose their own fonts) results in broken page.
- nyanpasu64 2y ago
  I think the author could've used "Publish to web" instead of preview mode, for a more accessible article view with better font rendering and keyboard control (though it changes image size and breaks right-aligned text).
wokwokwok 2y ago
This is a lovely write up, but oh boy... when I see: > Finally, I proposed that the future of font shaping and drawing/ painting will involve a fully-programmable paradigm. > Two tongue-in-cheek mis-uses of the HarfBuzz Wasm shaper appeared recently: the Bad Apple font, and llama.ttf. Check them out! See... the thing about solving problems is that, eventually you realize that any kind of problem can be solved by simply making a platform that can execute arbitrary code. ...and you see it again and again. Declarative compile definition in make? Why not just make it code and use cmake? Declarative infra in terraform? Why not just make it code and use pulumi? Declarative ui? Why not just make it code and use javascript? Database that holds data? Why not just use stored procedures and do it in code? The list just goes on and on, and every time you have to roll back to a few important questions: - Is the domain so complicated you really need arbitrary code execution? - Are you inventing a new programming language for it? - How will people program and test for the target? - How will you manage the security sandbox around it? It's just such a persuasive idea; can't figure out how to deal with the complexity in configuration? Make it code and push the problem to the user instead! Sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it works out. To be fair, I get it, yes, font layouts are harder than they look, and yes, using WASM as a target solves some of those issues, but I look at llama.ttf and I really have to pause and go... ...really? Does my font need to be able to implement a LLM? I don't really think it does. ...and even if the problem is really so complex that rendering glyphs requires arbitrary code (I'm not convinced, but I can see the argument), I think you should be doing this in shaders, which already exist, already have a security sandbox and already have an ecosystem of tooling around it. I think inventing a new programmable font thing is basically inventing a new less functional form of shaders, and it's a decision that everyone involved will come to regret...
- moonchild 2y ago
  programmable hinting was already a thing. it's just switching to wasm from a bespoke language
  - wokwokwok 2y ago
    It's still just doing exactly what shaders do, which is crazy. Explain to me exactly why, other than 'I guess someone already implemented some kind of basic version of it' that you would have to have custom CPU code rendering glyphs instead of a shader rendering SDF's like literally everyone does with shaders already? It's not a good solution. It's a bad, easy solution. We have a solution for running arbitrary GPU accelerated graphics instructions; it has a cross platform version with webGPU. This font thing... looks a lot like 'not invented here' syndrome to me, as an uninvolved spectator. Why would you chose or want not to use GPU acceleration to render your glyphs? What 'arbitrary code' does a font need to do that couldn't be implemented in a shader? Maybe the horse has already bolted, yes, I understand programmable fonts already exist.. but geez, its incomprehensible to me, at least from what I can see.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
florence023 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
slimsag 2y ago
> Moreover, the fontations platform, which is the Rust framework Oxidize is producing, will unify font compilation and consumption, reducing the number of places new font-format features need to be implemented from three (FontTools, FreeType, and HarfBuzz) to one (Fontations), which would reduce development cost and overhead. Will FreeType and HarfBuzz remain supported as C/C++ projects long-term, I wonder? Asking as someone who depends on these and doesn't want to introduce a dependency on a Rust compiler :) Anecdotally, I notice a lot of game developers avoid FreeType and Harfbuzz entirely, instead opting for much worse text rendering in the form of stb_truetype.h only (Dear Imgui uses this, for example) - which 'is nice because it is a single header C file' but sucks with international languages; many people use SDFs for similar reasons. I think the proposed move to WASM fonts, if done right, could make it easier to reduce the amount of code people need to render fonts (if the WASM font does the heavy lifting, and a small C program could render it) and alleviate this trend of people not using a good text rendering stack
- SSLy 2y ago
  > doesn't want to introduce a dependency on a Rust compiler you can link against pre-built .dll/.so/.dylib from your C++ code base.
  - account42 2y ago
    That only helps you if all your targets are also actively supported by upstream. It also limits optimization opportunities, mainly removing parts of the library your code doesn't need.
- jpc0 2y ago
  I'm confused. When has a wasm interpret and small C program ever been the same thing?
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    I think parent is saying the choice is between OpenType+large_C_library and font_WASM+small_library+generic_WASM_engine. Interpreting OpenType is very complex.
techn00 2y ago
To everybody complaining about the awful text rendering, it's literally in the first paragraph > [It is ironic indeed, that a text about text rendering, is presented in such an inaccessible and badly-typed environment. This is a Google Docs Preview page. I am still yet to find a solution that provides the same features (collaboration, commenting, live edits) and is presented better. Suggestions are appreciated.]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- account42 2y ago
  Acknowledging the irony doesn't remove it. It's yet another case of putting developer convenience over end user experience. Which for something provided for free is more than you paid for but still a subpar result that can be criticized.
- eviks 2y ago
  Why do you need those features for a published long document? Do the editing and collaboration in an ugly platform, but publish in something more readable?
alchemio 2y ago
RustyBuzz is quite limited when compared with HarfBuzz. The Rust fonts scene also seems to lack the necessary momentum to drive things through. I’m not sure whether it’s because the Rust community is mostly interested in webtech or whether Rust itself makes it hard to solve such complex problems. But I don’t see the sands shifting in less than 10 years to come.
- carlmr 2y ago
  I can't quite see why Rust would make it harder, it's always a breeze compared to working on C++ projects, especially as the project matures. The compiler catches a lot of issues early, which otherwise slow down C++ projects as they accumulate silently, because they should have fixed all warnings, should have used ASan, TSan, MSan, religiously, and should have agreed on a manageable subset of C++, ... but of course didn't. But I think the power of legacy and a bigger community is not to be underestimated.
- RazrFalcon 2y ago
  >RustyBuzz is quite limited when compared with HarfBuzz. As the main author of rustybuzz I'm surprised to hear this. If you need a text shaper, rustybuzz is mostly a drop-in replacement for harfbuzz. Text shaping and TrueType parsing are hard problems, but Rust does not make them more complicated. Quite the opposite. In fact, rustybuzz is written in 100% safe Rust. I would even go further and say that Rust is the only sane option for solving text-related tasks.
pineapple_sauce 2y ago
On rasterization & basic typesetting (no ligatures/gsub lookups): check out pixie https://github.com/treeform/pixie https://github.com/treeform/pixie
mhd 2y ago
I really have to install an old system with the Infinality patches again, I remember them to be quite excellent, but that was a few years, monitors and contact lense upgrades ago… Maybe I'll put RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi at the same time, which (IIRC) had one of the first antialiased font rendering engines ever. (I do have some old Macs running currently, and weirdly enough still prefer some of the old "blurry" font renderings to a lot of modern ones, at least on regular displays)
vanderZwan 2y ago
> [It is ironic indeed, that a text about text rendering, is presented in such an inaccessible and badly-typed environment. This is a Google Docs Preview page. I am still yet to find a solution that provides the same features (collaboration, commenting, live edits) and is presented better. Suggestions are appreciated.] Have you tried Observable? Their online notebook has live team editing built in, and the option to comment on cells, as well as fork and merge notebooks with suggested edits. However, it uses markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor (although I did create some tagged template wrappers for djot and markdeep as possible alternatives). On the plus side it's really easy to write interactive demos! They're kind of pivoting their product at the moment though, so I'm not sure how easy it is to get into the notebook part these days. [0] https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/djot https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/djot [1] https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/wrapping-markdeep-into-a-tagged-template https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/wrapping-markdeep-into-...
- bbkane 2y ago
  Tangent, but I just found Observable. How are they pivoting their product?
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    Before they tried to build a business with their notebooks alone, but they recently released Observable Framework[0], which is "a static site generator for data apps, dashboards, reports, and more" that you can install and run offline via npm[1]. IIUC the business plan is to make money by hosting the generated sites on their website, and offering tight integration with their existing notebook tech to continue to let people edit those cooperatively. I really hope they succeed because I'm a big fan of both Observable notebooks and the new Observable Framework (and their Observable Plot library is pretty good too. Really, they have tons of good stuff). But basically, they now have two products, as mentioned in the "overview" section of their docs[2]. [0] https://observablehq.com/framework/ https://observablehq.com/framework/ [1] https://github.com/observablehq/framework https://github.com/observablehq/framework [2] https://observablehq.com/documentation/learn/overview https://observablehq.com/documentation/learn/overview
dgreensp 2y ago
Wait, so the idea is in the future, fonts will contain arbitrary full-color vector and bitmap images, they will contain Web Assembly code that needs to be run, and they will be streamed over the network? I’m probably missing a few other proposals, as I only skimmed. Did anyone stop to consider if this is really necessary? The author makes it sound like he has used his influence steadily over the years to make fonts more complicated. “In year X, I proposed that fonts be able to do Y, because why not?” I get that text shaping is so complex, that in terms of open source, there is just Harfbuzz. I’m not an expert in this area. But I don’t think it’s a good thing if “font standards” are constantly getting new features, like web standards, and font renderers are like mini browser engines, where the sheer scope and number of features and rate of new features keeps everyone using the same codebases.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Well, we started this journey with bitmap fonts that wouldn't scale up, then most computers have been Western-oriented and didn't include full character sets for most of the people living on this planet. Then it turned out to be useful to be able to render languages and glyphs from dead ancient languages. And most languages other than English use all sorts of weird combining systems and accenting. When you type English it looks just like the keys you press. But type Arabic, especially with vowels, and it looks nothing like the keys you're hitting due to all the joining. But the real kicker was emojis which threw a real spanner in the works. Prior to this text rendering had been universally mono, but we really had to add color then. It's really about being inclusive. Writing (historically) was always something very analog, varying wildly between people, with all sorts of unbelievably arcane rules. Tech is just finally catching up with 5,000 years of history.
- sambazi 2y ago
  https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/ https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/
brohee 2y ago
Servo is tagged as dead but the revival seems to have somewhat worked. I guess nto nearly as many full time people than when it's was under Mozilla umbrella but not dead. And by the look of it neither is Pathfinder the rasteriser.
- lcouturi 2y ago
  This is mentioned later in the document: > An experimental engine Servo originally launched by Mozilla as a successor to Gecko, is implemented in Rust. It was eventually abandoned by Mozilla when Mozilla Corporation announced laying off a quarter of its staff in 2020 and transferred to The Linux Foundation, then in 2023 to TLF Europe. While still experimental, it has been under active development again since 2023. Servo currently uses Rust bindings to Harfbuzz. I'd say Servo is going pretty well. The git is fairly active and monthly updates on their blog paint a positive picture of the rate of progress. I try the engine out roughly monthly after the blog posts drop and when I last did a few days ago I was impressed to see a lot of my most used websites being displayed correctly. At this rate, I think it could become viable much sooner than we think. However, the project is still critically underfunded, currently only getting a monthly $2229USD according to their website.

204 points by behdad 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

making your article force a tiny, fixed, unchangeable font size seems like a good way to convince people that you should be nowhere near text rendering infrastructure

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
behdad 2y ago
Browser zoom works fine for me. Does it not for you?
- Findecanor 2y ago
  The page fights against zooming by reducing the text size to compensate. I can zoom in somewhat only if I press Ctrl + fast enough many times in succession, but then it is easy to overshoot.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    Interesting, when I zoom in to 300% the T in TLDR is exactly 3x taller than when at 100%. Seems to be an embedded Google Doc though so the canvas does a weird recentering jerk on viewport size changes.
    - account42 2y ago
      Zoom works until the page width is about the browser width. After that it starts fighting your zoom level.
School-Cotton 2y ago
The author is actually one of the most prominent and respected people in this space.
andsoitis 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
johnny22 2y ago
actually read the very beginning where it's clear why he's using this google doc thingy which the bad text...

compressedgas 2y ago

Hinting? No.

hi_dang_ 2y ago

Nice article but sometimes I don’t know what’s worse - the state of linux audio drivers, or the state of linux text rendering. It’s very easy to see when FreeType is used because it just looks off in a few, but significant ways. I’ve used it with and without Harf. DirectWrite has been a joy by comparison.

KronisLV 2y ago
I never had particular issues with Linux or Windows, but I have to say that I was surprised at how bad my MacBook looks when connected to an external 1080p monitor. I know Apple wants you to buy one of their fancy high resolution monitors or whatever, but it was so odd that one with a 1920x1080 resolution would look so bad. Even toggling the hi-dpi setting in BetterDisplay didn't help much. Here's a quick picture from a few days ago: https://imgur.com/a/GLohlj1 https://imgur.com/a/GLohlj1
- larschdk 2y ago
  I believe they don't even try to do hinting or sub-pixel rendering, where were key to Windows' crisp font rendering on low resolutions all the way back on Windows XP.
  - forgotpwd16 2y ago
    They don't indeed. Subpixel rendering was removed from macOS few years ago.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
7e 2y ago
I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll be dead before Linux fonts look good. That’s true of many Linux features, actually. “Public” software is the quality of most public infrastructure, sadly, and smells vaguely of piss.

heftig 2y ago

I'm not sure how this gets rendered, but the lack of hinting makes it a strain to read. What irony that an article about progress in text rendering has such awful rendering quality. PS: That is in Firefox. In Chrome it uses what appears to be a bitmap font, which is much worse.

FreeFull 2y ago
If you click the Google Docs link at the top of the document, you can then export it to html/txt/pdf.
maxwindiff 2y ago
I believe this is a Google doc preview. On my iPad it had terrible scrolling performance, and the shortcut to scroll to the top of the page (tap the top edge of the screen) doesn't work :(
- froh 2y ago
  indeed it is, as meanwhile confirmed at the top of the document.
Lammy 2y ago
This page breaks zoom and all scrolling keys (page up/down and space bar) in Firefox too on top of being ugly :/
- forgotpwd16 2y ago
  I'm on Firefox and zoom/page up/down work but space doesn't. Also using own font (disabling allow pages choose their own fonts) results in broken page.
nyanpasu64 2y ago
I think the author could've used "Publish to web" instead of preview mode, for a more accessible article view with better font rendering and keyboard control (though it changes image size and breaks right-aligned text).

wokwokwok 2y ago

This is a lovely write up, but oh boy... when I see: > Finally, I proposed that the future of font shaping and drawing/ painting will involve a fully-programmable paradigm. > Two tongue-in-cheek mis-uses of the HarfBuzz Wasm shaper appeared recently: the Bad Apple font, and llama.ttf. Check them out! See... the thing about solving problems is that, eventually you realize that any kind of problem can be solved by simply making a platform that can execute arbitrary code. ...and you see it again and again. Declarative compile definition in make? Why not just make it code and use cmake? Declarative infra in terraform? Why not just make it code and use pulumi? Declarative ui? Why not just make it code and use javascript? Database that holds data? Why not just use stored procedures and do it in code? The list just goes on and on, and every time you have to roll back to a few important questions: - Is the domain so complicated you really need arbitrary code execution? - Are you inventing a new programming language for it? - How will people program and test for the target? - How will you manage the security sandbox around it? It's just such a persuasive idea; can't figure out how to deal with the complexity in configuration? Make it code and push the problem to the user instead! Sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it works out. To be fair, I get it, yes, font layouts are harder than they look, and yes, using WASM as a target solves some of those issues, but I look at llama.ttf and I really have to pause and go... ...really? Does my font need to be able to implement a LLM? I don't really think it does. ...and even if the problem is really so complex that rendering glyphs requires arbitrary code (I'm not convinced, but I can see the argument), I think you should be doing this in shaders, which already exist, already have a security sandbox and already have an ecosystem of tooling around it. I think inventing a new programmable font thing is basically inventing a new less functional form of shaders, and it's a decision that everyone involved will come to regret...

moonchild 2y ago
programmable hinting was already a thing. it's just switching to wasm from a bespoke language
- wokwokwok 2y ago
  It's still just doing exactly what shaders do, which is crazy. Explain to me exactly why, other than 'I guess someone already implemented some kind of basic version of it' that you would have to have custom CPU code rendering glyphs instead of a shader rendering SDF's like literally everyone does with shaders already? It's not a good solution. It's a bad, easy solution. We have a solution for running arbitrary GPU accelerated graphics instructions; it has a cross platform version with webGPU. This font thing... looks a lot like 'not invented here' syndrome to me, as an uninvolved spectator. Why would you chose or want not to use GPU acceleration to render your glyphs? What 'arbitrary code' does a font need to do that couldn't be implemented in a shader? Maybe the horse has already bolted, yes, I understand programmable fonts already exist.. but geez, its incomprehensible to me, at least from what I can see.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

florence023 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

slimsag 2y ago

> Moreover, the fontations platform, which is the Rust framework Oxidize is producing, will unify font compilation and consumption, reducing the number of places new font-format features need to be implemented from three (FontTools, FreeType, and HarfBuzz) to one (Fontations), which would reduce development cost and overhead. Will FreeType and HarfBuzz remain supported as C/C++ projects long-term, I wonder? Asking as someone who depends on these and doesn't want to introduce a dependency on a Rust compiler :) Anecdotally, I notice a lot of game developers avoid FreeType and Harfbuzz entirely, instead opting for much worse text rendering in the form of stb_truetype.h only (Dear Imgui uses this, for example) - which 'is nice because it is a single header C file' but sucks with international languages; many people use SDFs for similar reasons. I think the proposed move to WASM fonts, if done right, could make it easier to reduce the amount of code people need to render fonts (if the WASM font does the heavy lifting, and a small C program could render it) and alleviate this trend of people not using a good text rendering stack

SSLy 2y ago
> doesn't want to introduce a dependency on a Rust compiler you can link against pre-built .dll/.so/.dylib from your C++ code base.
- account42 2y ago
  That only helps you if all your targets are also actively supported by upstream. It also limits optimization opportunities, mainly removing parts of the library your code doesn't need.
jpc0 2y ago
I'm confused. When has a wasm interpret and small C program ever been the same thing?
- yencabulator 2y ago
  I think parent is saying the choice is between OpenType+large_C_library and font_WASM+small_library+generic_WASM_engine. Interpreting OpenType is very complex.

techn00 2y ago

To everybody complaining about the awful text rendering, it's literally in the first paragraph > [It is ironic indeed, that a text about text rendering, is presented in such an inaccessible and badly-typed environment. This is a Google Docs Preview page. I am still yet to find a solution that provides the same features (collaboration, commenting, live edits) and is presented better. Suggestions are appreciated.]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
account42 2y ago
Acknowledging the irony doesn't remove it. It's yet another case of putting developer convenience over end user experience. Which for something provided for free is more than you paid for but still a subpar result that can be criticized.
eviks 2y ago
Why do you need those features for a published long document? Do the editing and collaboration in an ugly platform, but publish in something more readable?

alchemio 2y ago

RustyBuzz is quite limited when compared with HarfBuzz. The Rust fonts scene also seems to lack the necessary momentum to drive things through. I’m not sure whether it’s because the Rust community is mostly interested in webtech or whether Rust itself makes it hard to solve such complex problems. But I don’t see the sands shifting in less than 10 years to come.

carlmr 2y ago
I can't quite see why Rust would make it harder, it's always a breeze compared to working on C++ projects, especially as the project matures. The compiler catches a lot of issues early, which otherwise slow down C++ projects as they accumulate silently, because they should have fixed all warnings, should have used ASan, TSan, MSan, religiously, and should have agreed on a manageable subset of C++, ... but of course didn't. But I think the power of legacy and a bigger community is not to be underestimated.
RazrFalcon 2y ago
>RustyBuzz is quite limited when compared with HarfBuzz. As the main author of rustybuzz I'm surprised to hear this. If you need a text shaper, rustybuzz is mostly a drop-in replacement for harfbuzz. Text shaping and TrueType parsing are hard problems, but Rust does not make them more complicated. Quite the opposite. In fact, rustybuzz is written in 100% safe Rust. I would even go further and say that Rust is the only sane option for solving text-related tasks.

pineapple_sauce 2y ago

On rasterization & basic typesetting (no ligatures/gsub lookups): check out pixie https://github.com/treeform/pixie https://github.com/treeform/pixie

mhd 2y ago

I really have to install an old system with the Infinality patches again, I remember them to be quite excellent, but that was a few years, monitors and contact lense upgrades ago… Maybe I'll put RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi at the same time, which (IIRC) had one of the first antialiased font rendering engines ever. (I do have some old Macs running currently, and weirdly enough still prefer some of the old "blurry" font renderings to a lot of modern ones, at least on regular displays)

vanderZwan 2y ago

> [It is ironic indeed, that a text about text rendering, is presented in such an inaccessible and badly-typed environment. This is a Google Docs Preview page. I am still yet to find a solution that provides the same features (collaboration, commenting, live edits) and is presented better. Suggestions are appreciated.] Have you tried Observable? Their online notebook has live team editing built in, and the option to comment on cells, as well as fork and merge notebooks with suggested edits. However, it uses markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor (although I did create some tagged template wrappers for djot and markdeep as possible alternatives). On the plus side it's really easy to write interactive demos! They're kind of pivoting their product at the moment though, so I'm not sure how easy it is to get into the notebook part these days. [0] https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/djot https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/djot [1] https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/wrapping-markdeep-into-a-tagged-template https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/wrapping-markdeep-into-...

bbkane 2y ago
Tangent, but I just found Observable. How are they pivoting their product?
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  Before they tried to build a business with their notebooks alone, but they recently released Observable Framework[0], which is "a static site generator for data apps, dashboards, reports, and more" that you can install and run offline via npm[1]. IIUC the business plan is to make money by hosting the generated sites on their website, and offering tight integration with their existing notebook tech to continue to let people edit those cooperatively. I really hope they succeed because I'm a big fan of both Observable notebooks and the new Observable Framework (and their Observable Plot library is pretty good too. Really, they have tons of good stuff). But basically, they now have two products, as mentioned in the "overview" section of their docs[2]. [0] https://observablehq.com/framework/ https://observablehq.com/framework/ [1] https://github.com/observablehq/framework https://github.com/observablehq/framework [2] https://observablehq.com/documentation/learn/overview https://observablehq.com/documentation/learn/overview

dgreensp 2y ago

Wait, so the idea is in the future, fonts will contain arbitrary full-color vector and bitmap images, they will contain Web Assembly code that needs to be run, and they will be streamed over the network? I’m probably missing a few other proposals, as I only skimmed. Did anyone stop to consider if this is really necessary? The author makes it sound like he has used his influence steadily over the years to make fonts more complicated. “In year X, I proposed that fonts be able to do Y, because why not?” I get that text shaping is so complex, that in terms of open source, there is just Harfbuzz. I’m not an expert in this area. But I don’t think it’s a good thing if “font standards” are constantly getting new features, like web standards, and font renderers are like mini browser engines, where the sheer scope and number of features and rate of new features keeps everyone using the same codebases.

qingcharles 2y ago
Well, we started this journey with bitmap fonts that wouldn't scale up, then most computers have been Western-oriented and didn't include full character sets for most of the people living on this planet. Then it turned out to be useful to be able to render languages and glyphs from dead ancient languages. And most languages other than English use all sorts of weird combining systems and accenting. When you type English it looks just like the keys you press. But type Arabic, especially with vowels, and it looks nothing like the keys you're hitting due to all the joining. But the real kicker was emojis which threw a real spanner in the works. Prior to this text rendering had been universally mono, but we really had to add color then. It's really about being inclusive. Writing (historically) was always something very analog, varying wildly between people, with all sorts of unbelievably arcane rules. Tech is just finally catching up with 5,000 years of history.
sambazi 2y ago
https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/ https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/

brohee 2y ago

Servo is tagged as dead but the revival seems to have somewhat worked. I guess nto nearly as many full time people than when it's was under Mozilla umbrella but not dead. And by the look of it neither is Pathfinder the rasteriser.

lcouturi 2y ago
This is mentioned later in the document: > An experimental engine Servo originally launched by Mozilla as a successor to Gecko, is implemented in Rust. It was eventually abandoned by Mozilla when Mozilla Corporation announced laying off a quarter of its staff in 2020 and transferred to The Linux Foundation, then in 2023 to TLF Europe. While still experimental, it has been under active development again since 2023. Servo currently uses Rust bindings to Harfbuzz. I'd say Servo is going pretty well. The git is fairly active and monthly updates on their blog paint a positive picture of the rate of progress. I try the engine out roughly monthly after the blog posts drop and when I last did a few days ago I was impressed to see a lot of my most used websites being displayed correctly. At this rate, I think it could become viable much sooner than we think. However, the project is still critically underfunded, currently only getting a monthly $2229USD according to their website.