Windows / font / text futures ...

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 03/07/2016 06:08 PM, Noel Grandin wrote:
> 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.

Are you sure?  TeX for example is very careful with its calculations to 
ensure consistent layout across implementations, regardless of available 
floating-point functionality.