Today was FSOSS, and yes, I got a little soused at the end (thanks Zad). Dave introduced me to Stuart in the flesh, and he had some ideas for me towards my bug. I wanna get them down before I go to sleep.
1. he confirmed my visualization of mozilla text being something like a 16th century printing press. Mozilla arranges all the little blocks so its just right (I think of this as the layout stage)... and then slathers ink all over it and "presses" onto the screen.
2. he told me that mozilla/cairo for mac is already using atsui for all the layout stages, and that drawing ATSUI might not take that much of a performance hit.
3. he guessed that ATSUI just does synthesizing anyway, so synthesizing isn't as dirty a method as I think.
4. cairo was chosen and used as the gecko rendering backend because it supplies the opportunity to do cool things like full image scaling, rotation. AND it abstracts most of the multi-platform features (eg mac does one thing, bug windows doesn't do that thing... cairo allows both windows and mac to do a thing).
5. CoreText would be nice, but not necessarily worth the effort right now.
It was good to meet him. I got to get some good insight on the italics/bold bug, and I got to meet a Sharks fan (I didn't know they actually existed, aren't there only 3 teams in the NHL anyone likes... habs, leafs, sens).
What else happened at FSOSS you ask?
1. A talk by a Xen virtualization guy... made me understand why businesses would want to run vms.
2. Ben Smedberg from Mozilla who talked about reading code, why and how.
3. Fluid Project guy who talked about how his group was working with Blackboard like portal sites to make user interfaces more accessable/standard.
4. Bob Young from Lulu who talked about the eternal battle between good and evil.
More from the scene tomorrow.
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