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Hi Michael,

you write:
      Having looked at this heap; and worse - the two different heaps for
Windows text rendering, and also the big pile of strange cross-platform
issues with stacking diacritics, emojis etc. I'm pretty convinced that
we cannot do a good job of consistent text shaping and/or rendering
cross-platform while using the Windows font rendering infrastructure.

Yeah, I suppose. But that alone won't fix the kind of issues you show
in your ascii art - as long as so much low-level layouting is still
happening in Writer (dx arrays, kashida filling etc).

      While we could switch to DirectWrite on windows, which may solve some
of our problems; this will be in itself disruptive.

Incidentally - why that?

      So - I believe that we should switch to using harfbuzz and freetype
consistently everywhere. This would have the huge benefit of precise
cross-platform font rendering and metric fidelity, give us a font and
shaping stack that is fully introspectable, drop some legacy Windows API
usage, and allow all development work and fixing on all platforms to
share the same underlying code.

I think that promise cannot be kept. Let's evaluate the merit of
switching to some truly great floss libraries based on other aspects -
you're not even getting consistent floating point math between
different CPUs, let alone different operating systems...

      There will of course also be some corner-cases where we may simply not
be able to replicate the tangled old layout behaviour - which is
(anyway) inconsistent across platforms - but - I think this is a one-off
risk that is well worth taking to get us to a fully consistent, Free
Software rendering stack. It is interesting that Microsoft also used freetype
for their Office / Mac rendering in the recent past =)

Oh - got some reference for that? Since I guess for most complaints
about layouting problems I hear about, it's the different between MSO
and LibreOffice, rather than between LibreOffice on different
platforms. ;)

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

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