[FR] Improved text rendering

[jrlanglois]

I can agree to some extent that the text system needs work, just not in the ways you mention. The thing is, JUCE uses the native text shaping (ie: glyph making), except on Linux I think (because there isn’t one…).

@luzifer

JUCE is about the only platform that squeezes texts way out of proportion to make it fit

I’m not sure if you’re familiar enough, but the LookAndFeel lets you override that (look for drawLabel and drawFittedText in the repository). It’s entirely JUCE controlled, and tries to follow macOS conventions.

Also, juce::Label::setMinimumHorizontalScale will let you control that on a per instance level.

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If you really wanted a fully featured font and glyph support system, you would wrap the latest Harfbuzz and Freetype for all platforms the same.

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@luzifer

Also on one platform text overruns TextLayout 's bounds on the other the text is truncated (a bug report has been filed but i never got a response).

Right, this issue:

Different TextLayout behaviour across platforms

The behaviour of TextLayout::createLayout is different across platforms. On macOS and Linux the text is rendered to the end of the bounding rect while on Windows overflowing text is silently truncated. See the attached screenshot. [28] This is with word wrap set to AttributedString::WordWrap::none. In my opinion the first behaviour is right while the second isn’t. We would like to exploit the overflow behaviour to add an ellipsis character to indicate truncation. Q: Why not use drawText, Gly…

So this just follows suit with what I mentioned: blame native text shaping. The only way you’ll get consistent results is by using consistent implementations…