World: r3wp

Graham:


First prototype ready for review: DB interface, resizing, form validation

Coding: State machine, styles, messaging, reactors, dialogs, low 
level AGG, host kit interface
Pending: Help system

What does this mean?

Something to test now?

no, not until these parts are done.

i'm not commenting what will be  done ofcourse i didn't see it.


But i already looked at the richtext engine carl proposed 2 years 
ago and that's far to be good.... 

In fact richtext engine is supposed to be dialect layer on top of 
draw. 

That dialect layer is adapted normally to handle text rendering the 
proper way which implies that the lower level text functionnalities 

in draw for text related effects is better done than previously. 
That's all i say ...


Building a layer richtext what ever it is if the AGG /draw dialect 
exploit poorly the text related effects that will be a pain and a 
very small benefit...

This won't happen.

and more complexity you will add to your engine more unexpected problems 
you will face...


 Like what we experienced in area-tc... suddently our perffectly working 
 engine under wnidows XP shows strong bugs in rendering just by arriving 
 on windows7. After 6 month in searching the why  and not finding 
 any cause to that rendering jam I by chance tryed the ultimate thing 
 no programer does i retro versionned back like 10  version below 
 the rendering engine and there suddently i found that rendering problems 
 disapeared by miracle...


I spend 10 times more time searching why the rendering was defective 
on windows 7 than doing area-tc and viva-rebol.r.  And that's too 
what  completly killed my mood. What else can i do than try to make 
this community know my experience with extensive text processing 
in draw with R2 to not have the same conceptual lacks repeated in 
R3.


And clearly  in R2 the text commands in AGG/draw were not suited 
for docuement rendering... That  doesn't means AGG can't do it ... 
that means at that time the dialect draw wasn't designed to exploit 
 intensivly text rendering. I always said before runnning you have 
to learn to crawl, then to stand up, then to walk. for me the way 
i  saw the realisation of a rendering engine text oriented for draw 
dialect was first step changing the color of  choosen elements in 
the text, then changing the font spécificity anytime anywhere in 
the document then being able to do strong text manipulations like 
moving by drag and drop paragraphs, inserting multimedia content 
in the document, scaling paragraphs etc... 

ROBERT: 

In fact that depends what  the rich text engine aims ... for example 
read only rendering is pretty different of  real time editing wisiwyg 
engine... The complexity betwin both approach is like 1 to 100...

Robert I know that you aim to get a WisiWyg editor for makedoc Pro 
format (wich in a time i tryed to provide in a totally deferent rendering 
technology)

therefore as you have the wip in the hand robert i think richtext 
dialect will go the way of a realtime wisiwyg  system able to be 
applyed over all the wigets we want... (like draw basically)

Not being an expect but IIRC R2 text rendering is not done using 
AGG. From this alone a lot of known problems might be coming.

In R3 text rendering will be through AGG. We will look into unicode 
as well right from the start.

I just hat a short chat with Cyphre about this. And on Windows & 
Linux the glyph outlines are used to render the fonts.

So, this uses OS native font infrastructure.

nice  :) beacasue R2 font system was a pain ... knowing what works 
where was difficult...

I experienced it when porting area-tc to linux ... the rendering 
was ok but as the font wasn't fixed size the editing part was messed 
up.

but once again R2  AGG/draw text  wasn't desinged to handle this 
... we used fixed fonts because we had no other why to obtain the 
x and y size of each displayed glyph so in other word that a lack 
of a basic lower level function.

We are aware of most of the text rendering issues and IMO it makes 
sense that we try to get a release out of the door ASAP so you can 
all take a look and give feedback.

and ofcourse fied fonts where properly handle only on widows ... 
 fun thing was i tryed rendering using the same TTF file on linux 
but it was managed as unfixed font on linux ...

so see assuming fixed fonts is a global concept is a wrong thing 
it better to say ok font will be not fixed lets handle this properly 
and offer a way to manage them the easier way...

we needed to know the size of the letters displayed on screen because 
first of all in R2 when you call 2 times a text instruction the rendering 
at piled up at same place and not disposed one after another on the 
X axis with natural spacing... so draw [ text 10X10 "a" text "b"] 
renders a "b" over the "A" and not "A" followed by "B". And it's 
logical ... text instruct was then designed to handle a serie a letter 
or several series of letter organised in distinct block we can call 
words... but you see that concept doesn't fit with the need of having 
an interaction anytime with any letter componing the words.

and in the richtext proposition of Carl made 2 years ago (times flyes..) 
we find again this block concept wich is related to the way MakeDoc 
format handle things ...  like in HTML  for example you have flags 
that defines a rendering style. But the things betwin the flags can't 
evolve... they are not supposed to change font style or font size 
or font color. See that's what i would call a we treat text as block 
and not as single element able to singularly evolve on their own 
without affecting the surrounding elements.

ofcourse you still can say a <H1> </H1> instead of the basic regular 
seting will take this font this color this size but that will affect 
all it's content and not only a part of it ...

and then if you want to have an atomical approach then MakeDoc dialect 
becomes too verbous to be efficient... like in HTML more you want 
stylised things more you pile up flags and more you have problems 
debuging and having a direct acces to your raw document content... 
So it's clear that a real design have to be set for this richtext 
even if in the end rendering html or MAkeDoc or makeDocPro  with 
that dialect means a conversion stage.

that's why the proposition of carl to have an open flag system was 
cool ... he presented it years ago as a variable inside draw dialect 
to hold styles ... And i think people didn't see the good points 
in this approach ...

Any reference to this concept?

The idea is that we will have the low-level font rendering stuff 
accessible. Further a standard richt-text dialect will exist. If 
htis doesn't fit, you can change it and use any other concept to 
make richt-text available in apps.

The low-level part won't change.

http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/r3/gui/229.png

Text now works in hostkit.

ugly as always though

But I know, not the time for such arguing

correct

And be sure I appreciate your efforts to terminate the job.

Great news Henrik. Thanks for posting.

Cool. But those fonts still look kind of terrible :-)

Because it's not pixel precise font. I would like to see support 
for pixel precise font which could be in just a simple bitmap format.

the font handling has not changed, AFAIK

So what's left for 1:1 full View transition? View effect pipeline?

Cyphre hasn't talked about that, but that is probably next. I don't 
know exactly how many parts are left.

Carl is continuing with callback development, which now requires 
an expansion of the event queue mechanism.

(that's all I know about that)

cool info ... on callbacks :-)

Steeve is shorter than me and but ruder than me :)  ... Steeve ....

Because it's not pixel precise font.
 That's absolute nonsense.

but steeve have a point ...  it's ugly ... i don't know if that the 
antigrain thing but on the lower size fonts damn the rendering of 
the font is messed up ... you have on the same letter bigger and 
smaller parts... This was a problem we experienced on R2 too we noticed 
it. People said don't worry R3 is completly deferent etc... and in 
the result -> blured ugly fonts... like on R2  so wher is the gain 
?

shadwolf for the 56743892th time, the font rendering is not properly 
utilized from AGG yet,

I appreciate the effort too ... but when i say this part needs a 
real work that's not to be rude etc... that's true !! damn how can 
i provide a simple functionnality like Zoom + / - for text if bellow 
font-size 14 bold the font rendering is ugly ?

Henrik ... when will it be properly supported ?

when it gets important enough to fix. right now the priority is to 
get things working in the first place. we have an app to build and 
sell.

being properly supported means working that part serriously ... so 
when will that day come ?

I don't know, shadwolf.