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Show HN: I built a zero-browser, pure-JS typesetting engine for bit-perfect PDFs

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Re: Show HN: I built a zero-browser, pure-JS typesetting engine for bit-perfect PDFs

#23

Post by cosmiciron »

Yiin wrote: post #17
cosmiciron wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are completely right on all fronts. Thank you for taking a look at the code! You hit the exact architectural bottleneck. Right now, the engine uses Intl.Segmenter to find the grapheme boundaries, but then it just does a direct cmap lookup to get the advance widths. It currently lacks a parser for the OpenType GSUB (Glyph Substitution) and GPOS (Glyph Positioning) tables, which is why Arabic defaults to isolated f…

Not sure what's the point of it being so fast and so small if it's also wrong.

And what's the point of being right when it's slow and bloated? Come on, it works for a lot of use cases, and it doesn't work for some. And it's still evolving.

Re: Show HN: I built a zero-browser, pure-JS typesetting engine for bit-perfect PDFs

#24

Post by whosegotit »

cosmiciron wrote: post #13
raphlinus wrote: post #8

Unfortunately, your complex script shaping for Arabic and Devanagari is wrong. The Arabic is missing the joining (all forms are isolated), and the Devanagari doesn't have the vowels combining (so you see those dotted circles). To fix this you'll need Harfbuzz or something similar. Taking a quick look at the code, it seems like you're just doing a glyph at a time through the cmap. That, uh, won't do.

You are completely right on all fronts. Thank you for taking a look at the code! You hit the exact architectural bottleneck. Right now, the engine uses Intl.Segmenter to find the grapheme boundaries, but then it just does a direct cmap lookup to get the advance widths. It currently lacks a parser for the OpenType GSUB (Glyph Substitution) and GPOS (Glyph Positioning) tables, which is why Arabic defaults to isolated f…

All your comments here appear to be run through an ai engine, while you might think it makes you sounds better if English isn’t your native tongue, it just comes off as insincere, I’d rather read your bad grammar than feel like I’m communicating with a clanker.

Re: Show HN: I built a zero-browser, pure-JS typesetting engine for bit-perfect PDFs

#27

Post by wmf »

LastTrain wrote: post #19

So this is what it has come to? AI bots writing code and fake origin stories of said code and AI bots commenting on it any other bots responding? This is front page content now? HN: please require all AI generated content to be flagged as such. Ban offenders. This just blows.

I think I'm more tired of AInvestigations than of AI now.

Re: Show HN: I built a zero-browser, pure-JS typesetting engine for bit-perfect PDFs

#29

Post by cosmiciron »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #16

> If you generate PDFs with headless browsers or HTML-to-PDF tools, you've accepted a compromise: heavy dependencies, memory leaks, and "approximate" layout that shifts across environments Absolutely not true with Prince[0]. It's an HTML/CSS-based typesetter built by the creator of CSS (Håkon Wium Lie [1]) that is lightweight, cross-platform, requires no dependencies, has no memory leaks, is 100% consistent in its ou…

Thanks for the correction. I'm actually not familiar with Prince, so I really can't tell.

To be clear, VMPrint isn't meant to compete with established engines like that. It’s just a genuinely helpful tool I built from scratch for the specific tasks I needed to accomplish because I couldn't find an alternative.

Prince looks powerful, but I have a feeling it probably wouldn't have been the right fit for my use case anyway.

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