Windows / font / text futures ...

[Noel Grandin]

On 7 March 2016 at 18:22, Thorsten Behrens <thb at documentfoundation.org> wrote:
> You're getting different rounding even depending on the flags your OS
> (or driver that happens to be in your process) sets. Seriously - I'm
> too lazy to dig out references, but consider floating point math to be
> inherently non-similar from one box to the next, *unless* you're
> extremely careful across the entire calculation chain (which is the
> case in Calc).
>

While this is an issue for actual math on potentially very large or
very small numbers (which is, I assume, why calc is careful with it),
and an issue for games with large 3D worlds, it can hardly be an issue
for the magnitudes of numbers we deal with in the font rendering
paths.

> C.f. chart2.
>
Even chart2's world-geometry is relatively small in the grander scale
of things. And issues there have far less impact than the glaring font
rendering issues elsewhere.

> I'm afraid we're in for that regardless. Norbert, Khaled, Tor IIRC & a
> number of other hackers all came to the conclusion that the vcl font
> API / the way Writer is doing layout is in serious need for rework,
> before any amount of font layouting/rendering happiness can be
> attained.

Surely that orthogonal is to the font-rendering down in the VCL layer.
We can fix the one without making the other any worse.
I would assume that attempting to fix both at the same time would be a
boiling-the-ocean type problem, much better to work on them
independently.