Pretext's most interesting use cases have no DOM at all

https://cyrusradfar.com/thoughts/pretext-beyond-the-browser

by cyrusradfar • 4 months ago

14 5 4 months ago

lewisjoe2• 4 months ago

This is not an accurate take. Especially the SSR one. Pretext doesn't liberate text layout from the browser entirely (at least not yet). It still uses canvas.measureText that does critical heavy lifting like font fallbacks, default styles, etc.

Once you take pretext out of browser environment, you'll have to worry about lot more things around fonts.

cyrusradfar2• 4 months ago

OP here, you're right. I discuss that as a next step at the end. The process to get to this point is the insight to how to accomplish this cross platforms.

lewisjoe2• 4 months ago

Got it! :)

cyrusradfar2• 4 months ago

Update:

A port to Swift has been released April 1 by Tornike Gomareli (https://x.com/tornikegomareli) the community so now it's able to be used in Mac Native apps

  - tweet: https://x.com/tornikegomareli/status/2039516374788124865
  - repo: https://github.com/tornikegomareli/swift-pretextkit

pjmlp• 4 months ago

Basically, yet another group of folks rediscovered native text layout engines.

Back and forth the pendulum goes.

Pretext's most interesting use cases have no DOM at all

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