Re: typesetting text

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Friday, December 15, 2000, at 06:01 PM, Fred Kiefer wrote:


<snipped - a lot of stuff I agree with>

> I like the idea of caching the glyph/"word" information, but that should 
> be hidden very deeply in the typesetter or glyph generator, and perhaps 
> this is also second on the list, after writing the data structure to 
> hold those "words" . 

Yes.

> What is missing in your paper is a discussion on how layout could be 
> processed in the background. This will make everything a lot more 
> complex, but will speed up things from the users point of view. 

Probably a secondary task anyway - you want the visible screen to be
updated in the foreground anyway.
I think that what is needed here is -
1. A way of marking stuff as valid - so we know when layout needs to be
done.
2. A way of recognising when layout of the visible area is complete,
and leaving the remainder of the text marked invalid.
I guess that's actually the main part of doing background layout anyway.