<story><title>Nova by Panic</title><url>https://nova.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Brendinooo</author><text>&amp;gt; Here&amp;#x27;s a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple&amp;#x27;s text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor&amp;#x27;s performance. We&amp;#x27;re not messing around!&lt;p&gt;Seems like there&amp;#x27;s nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They&amp;#x27;re willing to push Apple&amp;#x27;s UI forward, but they always do it in a way that feels Apple-y. Didn&amp;#x27;t they also pioneer a tab UI that Apple ended up adopting?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sho_hn</author><text>To me, the quote and what you put after came as a big surprise - I was ready to nod in agreement as you recognize this as a sad story about the platform.&lt;p&gt;The last time I was working on a text editor (KDE&amp;#x27;s Kate) and found a bug in the text layout engine it was written against (Qt&amp;#x27;s), I wrote a patch, submitted it upstream and it made everyone else&amp;#x27;s apps better, too.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can&amp;#x27;t read source code of or improve.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nova by Panic</title><url>https://nova.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Brendinooo</author><text>&amp;gt; Here&amp;#x27;s a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple&amp;#x27;s text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor&amp;#x27;s performance. We&amp;#x27;re not messing around!&lt;p&gt;Seems like there&amp;#x27;s nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They&amp;#x27;re willing to push Apple&amp;#x27;s UI forward, but they always do it in a way that feels Apple-y. Didn&amp;#x27;t they also pioneer a tab UI that Apple ended up adopting?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mooman219</author><text>&amp;quot;Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch&amp;quot;. I would be pessimistic of the magnitude of this statement.&lt;p&gt;I do a significant amount of text engine work and I&amp;#x27;m skeptical what they implied by this. The likely case is they glued together other solutions (Like HarfBuzz&amp;#x2F;FreeType&amp;#x2F;etc) and expose their own API on top of that. This is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged for accessibility reasons. It may be that CoreText isn&amp;#x27;t acceptable for their use case.&lt;p&gt;What I think this would be misinterpreted as them writing the whole stack from scratch. For example, shaping is part of layout and it would be monumental if they wrote their own shaper given even HarfBuzz, DirectWrite, and CoreText do not have complete coverage yet. Additionally, BiDi + line breaking + shaping has bugs even in Chrome on some edge cases.</text></comment>