Re: Pixel-based display functions

[Stefan Monnier]

> However, having the three functions I described (that work "fast
> enough"; I've already written versions of them that aren't fast enough)
> is necessary for multi-column layout.  And in addition, it would also
> fix the "variable pitch in the manual" problem.

Coding it in C can make it faster, but you still have the problem of
laziness (which is a general problem for shr, by the way): how to only
render the displayed part of the HTML document, which is crucial to get
reasonable speed on non-small documents.

> So two birds with one mechanism, instead of having to invent one
> mechanism for single-column layouts,

That's the only I really care about, and I think there's much more of
a chance that we can actually make it work reliably with good speed.

If we do it using the "general" approach in Elisp, I'm afraid we won't
make it work well enough within the foreseeable future (e.g. remember:
one of the features of current info-mode is that it's very quick, so
a replacement that introduces a 1s rendering delay whenever we switch to
another page won't be good enough).


        Stefan