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Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

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Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#681

Post by lambda »

breck wrote: post #656
lambda wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, nice! I have a notes file experimenting with a similar tree-style minimalist data notation; it's definitely an area that needs more exploration. I like what you've done with it, I'll need to take a closer look. While I was thinking about it, I also decided to take a look into prior art, which took me all the way back to Landin's "The Next 700 Programming Languages" from 1966 which introduced the hypothetical lan…

Yes, and surprisingly there are not too many that use any indentation based syntax (about 1 in 50). However, of the ones that do (abc, aldor, boo, buddyscript, cobra, coffeescript, csl, curry, elixir, f-sharp, genie, haml, haskell, inform, iswim, literate-coffeescript, livescript, madcap-vi, madcap, makefile, markdown, miranda, nemerle, net-format, nim, occam, org, promal, python, restructuredtext, sass, scss, spin,…

Cool! Thanks for some more reading and inspiration.

Here's what I have in my notes buffer; I hadn't gotten much further than this.

  Ssn: /([0-9]{9})|([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4})/\1\2\3/
  People: Table
      first: String
      last: String
      dob: Date
      ssn: SSN

  Csv
      headings: True
      load people.csv
          as: People
      select first last dob
      filter dob.age > 21
Well, I had some discussion, alternate forms of the syntax, links to prior art, etc, but not much else worth sharing.

Will have to add your TreeNotation and Ohayo to that list, as well as these other links you've shared.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#682

Post by mekkkkkk »

pjmlp wrote: post #410
mekkkkkk wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop. Don't know about Touch, but one would assume it carries over at some point.

I mean with the same adoption success.

What? Ubuntu Touch is an OS. Flutter is just a GUI framework, like Qt. Not sure what you're trying to say.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#683

Post by aloer »

snewman wrote: post #680

Speaking as one of the original three authors of Google Docs (Writely), but zero involvement in this project (I left Google in 2010): I'm seeing a lot of comments asking how JavaScript-on-Canvas could possibly outperform the highly optimized native code built into the browser engines. It's been a long time since I've really been involved in browser coding, but having written both Writely and, farther back, several na…

How would you recommend someone to get started learning about the architecture of Text editors / word processors?

I think Monaco from vscode is probably an interesting read but I’ve never looked at such a big open source code base before.

Is there something you can recommend to understand better how it works architecturally?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#684

Post by dmitriid »

strogonoff wrote: post #201
dmitriid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it can't be done in HTML+CSS in a performant way.

VS Code feels performant enough, with its complex functionality IMO exceeding Google Docs, and yet I don't think it is using canvas. I believe it comes down to strategic design that avoids unnecessary layout and reflow events in the UI. That said, the UI of VS Code (the desktop app) only needs to run in Chromium. And generally Google Docs could be a different enough beast that it can’t take advantage of the same tric…

> VS Code feels performant enough, with its complex functionality

VS Code has an entire dedicated team that only works on VS Code. They can spend resources on trying any trick in the book to make something performant. Whenever actual performance is required, well, they ditch DOM and go for canvas: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...

And while sufficiently complex, it actually displays significantly less complex information than required by a regular document that will have any number of fonts, layouts, inline images and tables, references to other documents, etc.

> I believe it comes down to strategic design that avoids unnecessary layout and reflow events in the UI.

Yup. And it's nearly impossible to do any amount of "strategic design" because if you as much as glance at a document, it will repaint and reflow: https://csstriggers.com

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#685

Post by andrewprock »

mcherm wrote: post #355
dahfizz wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing DRM on something you own for personal use is perfectly legal.

> Removing DRM on something you own for personal use is perfectly legal. Perhaps some places. In the US, it is perfectly legal to "violate" copyright restrictions for purposes like fair use. But if the data is protected by any kind of security, it is a felony to bypass that security (even for fully legal purposes).[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

What does security mean when there is no ad unless it is shepherded out of the blob? Once it's out of the blob, there is no security to bypass.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#686

Post by snewman »

aloer wrote: post #683
snewman wrote: post #680

Speaking as one of the original three authors of Google Docs (Writely), but zero involvement in this project (I left Google in 2010): I'm seeing a lot of comments asking how JavaScript-on-Canvas could possibly outperform the highly optimized native code built into the browser engines. It's been a long time since I've really been involved in browser coding, but having written both Writely and, farther back, several na…

How would you recommend someone to get started learning about the architecture of Text editors / word processors? I think Monaco from vscode is probably an interesting read but I’ve never looked at such a big open source code base before. Is there something you can recommend to understand better how it works architecturally?

I'd love to have a good answer for you, but I learned the basics all the way back in the '80s. Seems like I've seen references posted occasionally on HN, hopefully someone has a good link.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#687

Post by habitue »

incrudible wrote: post #643
dangoor wrote: post #563

In 2009, I joined Mozilla and started working on the Bespin[1] project, which Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer had brought to Moz. Bespin was built with a canvas-based renderer. Bespin was way faster than other browser-based code editors at the time. Then the Ajax.org/Cloud9 folks came along with their Ace editor[2], which was DOM-based and still very fast. We ended up merging the projects. edit to add: and switching to D…

> ... it's hard to beat just drawing on a canvas or using WebGL. Both of these APIs perform quite poorly for what they're doing. To compete with native, the web platform needs simple low-level APIs that do not have a lot of Javascript marshalling overhead and other performance cliffs. You can always build a more convenient library above low-level interfaces, but the opposite is not true.

It seems like WebGPU is the next thing:

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#688

Post by sambroner »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #309
vishnumohandas wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there plans to launch an end-to-end encrypted version of Writer?

We develop app that does have end-to-end encryption. From my experience, people who demand it rarely understand what it means and how many inconveniences true e2ee introduces to a product. Anyway, if you are seriously worrying about the privacy of your documents, just use a localy deployed libreoffice and send encrypted files to your contacts.

What app are you developing?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#689

Post by BlueTemplar »

ska wrote: post #605
nvrspyx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer LibreOffice over Open Office, but I believe both are cross-platform (Linux, Windows, macOS). Then, I'd just use Dropbox or similar to save the files to for cloud storage. The only downside is no real-time collaboration. You can also look into Collabora, but I don't have any experience with it. If you don't require Linux support or if the web is tolerable for Linux, I personally recommend the Microsoft Office…

> The only downside is no real-time collaboration. This isn't a small thing for many users.

IMHO HTML documents backed by a versioning system (probably fossil or pijul rather than the overly complex git) are the way forward for documents where content is much more important than presentation.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#690

Post by dmitriid »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #151
disease wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the real reason for the change as well. A few years ago Visual Studio Code underwent a similar change where rendering the terminal moved from using DOM to canvas. I never noticed a huge difference between the two methods but I imagine using canvas gave them a lot more flexibility in addition to being more performant.

> I imagine using canvas gave them a lot more flexibility in addition to being more performant. I'm perplexed because I don't expect canvas rendering to be faster - or necessarily more flexible - because the web is document-first: HTML and CSS were/are all built-around describing and styling textual content , and computer program source code files are invariably all textual content files. So while browsers all have h…

> because the web is document-first: HTML and CSS were/are all built-around describing and styling textual content

They were built to display static textual content. Moreover, they were built to display static textual content on 90s-era computers in a single rendering pass. IIRC two-pass rendering didn't appear until some improvements around tables in early 2000s.

For that, yes, they are quire fast. Anything else? Nope.

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