For those who haven't been following Moonlight development, I'm the guy that has been implementing all the text layout and rendering.
Let me start off by saying that text is hard. Really hard. Especially layout.
Font Hinting
The aspect of text rendering that I've been thinking a lot about lately is hinting. For an example of the difference that hinting makes with text rendering, see the following screenshot:
In the screenshot above, I've posted side-by-side text renderings produced by both Moonlight and Pango (courtesy of Michael Dominic K.) for Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman fonts. You'll notice that especially at the smaller font sizes, Moonlight's text rendering gets a bit fuzzy and hard to read. On the contrary, Pango's rendering, using hinting, has improved readability over Moonlight.
Why don't I just use hinting, you ask?
The problem is that hinting changes the font metrics in such a way that as you scale to larger sizes, the metrics do not scale uniformly (you'll notice that as the font sizes increase, the width of the line gets uniformly wider using Moonlight, but not so with Pango). This causes a bit of a problem for Moonlight (and Silverlight) because:
- with hinting enabled, scaling the font size in an animation would look jumpy
- this is made even worse when you consider line wrapping and how changing font metrics would mean that line wrapping would also change with the changing font size
In most applications, the text in each UI element is unlikely to change size (unless the user manually changes the font settings), and so enabling the use of hinting has no adverse side effects. Silverlight (and thus Moonlight), however, are meant to do all sorts of animations which may apply matrix transforms (such as scaling) to any item in the canvas (even text!).
Since scaling has to look smooth, it's hard to use hinting because of the way it changes the metrics.
Hopefully I can find a way to improve rendering quality at the smaller sizes without getting the side effects I mentioned above, or at least have them be far less noticeable.
Line Breaking
While not thinking about the render quality of the text, the bane of my existence has been implementing layout algorithms for the 3 different TextWrapping modes used in Silverlight (Wrap, NoWrap, and WrapWithOverflow).
I've mostly been focusing on TextWrapping=Wrap lately as it's probably the hardest one to implement, especially if I want to emulate the Silverlight wrapping behavior (from what I can gather by reading the Pango source code, there are ambiguities in the Unicode specification for line-breaking, so I've been having to familiarize myself with the rules for line-breaking lately).
Going Forward
In the future, I hope to replace my text layout/rendering code with the use of Pango but in order for that to happen, Pango will need a few new features:
- The ability to specify fonts outside of the configured font directories (e.g. a way to bypass FontConfig). From what I understand, this is already happening so I expect to be able to cross this off the list soon ;-)
- The ability to mark the beginning/end of a sub-run of text. Silverlight's <TextBlock> element supports child <Run> elements. This normally wouldn't be a big deal, but Silverlight uses the joint between two runs as a possible break opportunity. For example, <Run Text="abcdefg"/><Run Text="hijklmn"/> might line-wrap differently than <Run Text="abcdefghijklmn"/> even though there are no spaces between the two runs. Currently, when rendering a string of text using Pango, you combine all runs into a single string to pass to a PangoLayout, so the layout engine doesn't have a way of knowing that a position mid-word should be treated as a break opportunity.
- Pango will need a way to specify alternative text wrapping modes (so that it would be possible to emulate Silverlight's TextWrapping behavior). Apparently Owen and Behdad have already discussed the desire to have this sort of feature, so I'm looking forward to working with them on designing a suitable API.
- A way to specify that font metrics should scale uniformly as the font size changes. Update: Behdad has notified me that this feature is actively being worked on and that I can enable it via CAIRO_HINT_METRICS_OFF.
- The last thing that I can think of at the moment that Pango will need is a way to reset the Foreground brush for each run and each time each of those runs line-breaks. For example, the following screenshot consists of a single TextBlock with two Run elements which share their parent's font and foreground brush properties. This means that the prepare_run() virtual method for the subclassed PangoRenderer will need to know the extents of the next sub-run of text to be rendered so that it can properly setup the custom foreground brush.
In the meantime, having to write my own layout/rendering engine for text has taught me a lot more about text and fonts than I ever wanted to know and I'm continuing to learn more every day.
Update: With all of these custom changes that I'll need in order to move to Pango, I'm beginning to wonder if it's really worth it? The only thing that it could get me is the Unicode line-breaking logic, but the thing is... if I have to implement my own pluggable TextWrapping modes, then wouldn't I still essentially be implementing my own line-breaking logic? This makes me very sad :(
