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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

#911

Post by silicon2401 »

ufmace wrote: post #761
highwind wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Google Docs a better product than MS Office? Can you provide some examples of features that are better in Google Docs?

Personally, I like it better sometimes for having less features. MS Word has such a massive number of formatting features that interact in complex ways that there's plenty of ways for your document to end up formatted in a weird way and to be very difficult to figure out exactly where the switch is to make it not do something. I think one time I had a document where the entire doc was highlighted in yellow, and it to…

Unfortunately I do agree with this. I think a lot of tech isn't a matter of "what's the best?" but instead "what's the least bad?". I don't think Office is perfect but I think it's a lot less bad than google. I don't think MacOS is great but it's a lot better than windows for certain things, and vice versa. IMO unless software puts the user first in allowing customization and control, the best we can ever get is good instead of great.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#912

Post by silicon2401 »

teddyh wrote: post #658
silicon2401 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you prefer about Libreoffice? I've used both once or twice but not enough to really learn anything about them

LibreOffice is an actual active project; OpenOffice is a political ghost entity.

Very good to know, thanks!

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#913

Post by jordache »

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…

Does the challenge of word processors extend to these chromium based IDEs like VsCode ? I wonder if that can also be optimized if going to a non DOM based approach?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#914

Post by simiones »

gentleman11 wrote: post #490
simiones wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever used a real UI framework, HTML/CSS is absolutely a nightmare. It is missing almost entirely in any kind of useful controls, which is why there are so many myriads of control libraries. Edit: however, replacing HTML+CSS with a canvas is absolutely a step in the wrong direction. I'm advocating for a richer Web, not a stream of pixels controlled by Google.

Care to elaborate what “real ui frameworks” do better? What frameworks do you have in mind when you say that?

Sure! I'm thinking of things like QT, WPF, WinForms, Java Swing.

What these have in common that is missing from HTML/CSS/DOM is a significant library of controls and layouts.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#915

Post by zepto »

breck wrote: post #443
bri3d wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million times this - having worked in this space, nobody wants to do this. I understand the cynicism, but the affordances provided by the browser for things like accessibility are very painful to give up. This isn't some dark pattern attempt to cut out whatever "openness" remains on the web, or to convert the browser into a display-streaming client for some sinister DRM reason. In my past job, we rewrote our spread…

> The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution. About a decade ago I had the start of a Eureka moment on how to do this (back then — https://medium.com/space-net/spacenet-51aca95d49a2 , nowadays https://treenotation.org/ ). It seems to me we've missed a sort of fundamental…

Do you have a more formal documentation for treenotation? The idea is intriguing but I couldn’t find the actual rules specified on the site.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#916

Post by marcodave »

pjmlp wrote: post #123
silicon2401 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this 100%. After using google office for years (just because it's free and cloud-based), I recently tried MS Word and Excel recently at work. The different was mind-blowing. I forgot just how functional and straightforward MS Office is compared to the clunky, barebones google options. If I wanted a desktop-first, cloud-backed solution, what would be the most future-proof and durable? Can I use Open Office a…

Maybe an heresy around here, Microsoft Office with SharePoint backed server.

A free OneDrive account is enough, plus Office 2016+ autosave function, with the added bonus to have a cloud version of word to edit in collaboration your document on the go

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#917

Post by ThomasBHickey »

This whole discussion reminds me of work we did in the early 80's trying to convert typesetting tapes into TeX/Metafont for display/printing. One the things we tried was converting scanned images into rectangles which could then be typeset by TeX using 'rules' of various sizes. Another approach was to convert the scans into specialized fonts, either whole or in contiguous chunks that could be assembled.

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#918

Post by augustl »

I wonder how they will _measure_ the text. You can use the range API to get the client rects for individual letters of text nodes in DOM, and then you could render that into a canvas letter-by-letter. You'd get kerning etc handled by the browser. But canvas has no such API afaik. Maybe Google has implemented their own kerning?

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#919

Post by breck »

zepto wrote: post #915
breck wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution. About a decade ago I had the start of a Eureka moment on how to do this (back then — https://medium.com/space-net/spacenet-51aca95d49a2 , nowadays https://treenotation.org/ ). It seems to me we've missed a sort of fundamental…

Do you have a more formal documentation for treenotation? The idea is intriguing but I couldn’t find the actual rules specified on the site.

The rules for the basic notation are really simple. It's just basically a grid (visualize a spreadsheet), where each line is a row and each word is a cell. Indent a line to indicate a child node/row.

An updated spec: https://faq.treenotation.org/spec/

Re: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

#920

Post by zepto »

breck wrote: post #919
zepto wrote: post #915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a more formal documentation for treenotation? The idea is intriguing but I couldn’t find the actual rules specified on the site.

The rules for the basic notation are really simple. It's just basically a grid (visualize a spreadsheet), where each line is a row and each word is a cell. Indent a line to indicate a child node/row. An updated spec: https://faq.treenotation.org/spec/

Thanks - that’s what I was looking for! Looks like a potential improvement on s-expressions to me in terms of a readable syntactic kernel.

For what it’s worth, I have been interested in the concept of 2d languages for quite some time, and I’m not sure what your definition is.

To me this seems to have a 1d topology - I.e. it’s still left to right top to bottom, and there are no loops or semantics that require reading in other directions.

I contrast this with something like a circuit diagram or labview program.

I may be missing something though.

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