Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

"When enabled the font engine will train a weighting model to provide estimates for string sizes. Once the model is sufficiently trained it will perform string wrapping without calling ctx.measureText once. This leads to massive performance gains at the cost of accuracy."

excuse me, what?

Oct 25, 2024 at 11:24pmWeb
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Oct 25, 2024
text sizes are too slow! lets instead train a model to estimate text size, inaccurately
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Oct 25, 2024
yeah it does a thing where it measures the width of characters up until you've rendered 20,000 (or 500,000?) characters and then if so, it relies on a small hashmap of character->info that it estimates from instead of using the real measureText
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Oct 25, 2024
that is slightly wacky and I'm not sure I want to use it
Show threadΣ(i³) = (Σi)²Oct 26, 2024
@foone Maybe it would be better if it was on the blockchain?
Show threadtaylor Oct 25, 2024
@foone "train a model" is an EXTREMELY OTT way to say "we precalculate the width of each character and fudge the numbers a bit because it worked a bit better"
Show threadGregOct 25, 2024
@foone feels like an oversight in font rendering toolkits that you can't just ask for an approximate width, as it would probably know best
Show threadhalcy​ Oct 26, 2024

@greg @foone is there any way to like, general case do that with modern fonts with ligatures and what have you that is meaningfully faster than just rendering and checking how many pixels you end up with?

edit: I didn’t the word „approximate“ in there oops. But yeah

Show threadDJGummikuhOct 25, 2024
@foone "this leads to massive performance gains at the cost of accuracy" also holds true for just using a static value 🤣🤣
Show threadMildDrop72  Oct 26, 2024
@foone I searched this on GitHub to find the source and ended up stumbling upon what appears to be someone trying to earn some kind of cryptocurrency by spamming GitHub and npm with fake contributions, this is just one of the accounts: https://github.com/f1stnpm2
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