[MartinMond]

> One that I've repeatedly gone back to over the years is paginated rich text editing. It's simply impossible to do with contenteditable in a product level way - one of the reasons Google docs has a custom layout engine.

As do we at Nutrient, we use Harfbuzz in WASM plus our own layouting - see the demo here: https://document-authoring-demo.nutrient.io/

Getting APIs for that into the Platform would make life significantly easier, but thanks to WASM it’s not a total showstopper.

Btw, I saw you’re working on sync at ElectricSQL - say hi to Oleksii :)

[Waraqa]

I just tested this demo and it noticed it doesn't support Arabic text rendering (the letters should be connected) which is a main feature of Harfbuzz

[skrebbel]

Woa that's some heavy SVG lifting going on there!

If I get it right, every glyph used from the given font is rendered once as a SVG path (upside down! huh!), and then the whole page is a single huge SVG element in which every typed character is a <use> with a reference to that rendered glyph, translated with a CSS transform to the right place (i assume these coordinates come out of HarfBuzz?). Kinda mad that you had to redo 90% of the browser that way but the result is pretty impressive!

I'm curious why you render the glyphs to paths and not have the browser render those directly using eg svg <text> elements?

Was it hard to get this to work cross browser?

ps. srsly I love this about the web. You're doing this amazing engineering feat and I can just pop the trunk and learn all about it. Obviously feel free to not answer anything that's deemed a trade secret, I'm just geeking out hard on this thing :-) :-)

[rjsw]

You can't size other SVG elements around text ones since you don't know how much space the text element will occupy.

[qingcharles]

And, I think we've come full circle. I'm pretty sure that's how I was rendering text for the online office suite[] I wrote in ~1998 -- a Java Applet embedded in the browser.

[] VCs: "We're not investing in this crap! No company in their right mind would store their precious, confidential documents on the Internet!"