Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by cellularmitosis on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @01:09PM (#27132624)

You can ditch the off-screen rendered pages but you are still stuck with the entire 1000-page data structure. Should your current line be on page 997 or 998? You have to calculate the size of every line of every page to answer that.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by hctaw on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @01:30PM (#27132894)

Efficient 3 dimensional position or range queries (line/column/page) is a pretty well studied problem. You don't need to query every point of the space to answer anything.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by jasim on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @01:59PM (#27133255)

I could not find clear references with an initial search. Can you expand a bit more about this approach? Thanks.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by hctaw on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @04:14PM (#27134597)

It's a task more commonly found in computational geometry (3D range query == find all the points in a data set enclosed by a cube).

There are numerous data structures that are well suited for various geometric queries like ranges/lookups (interval trees, quadtrees) as well as more text-oriented operations like cut/copy/paste/insert/merge/etc (like ropes).

I'm not familiar with the operations required to put a cursor at the right place in a document, but knowing how much research has gone into storing similar data and looking up what you need efficiently the idea of "going through all the text every time" is a big code smell.

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by ctoth on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @02:57PM (#27133861)

I've used a segment tree[0] for a similar problem before. For 3D queries an R-tree may be more appropriate.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_tree

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by williamscs on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @01:23PM (#27132808)

But does switching to using canvas solve that problem?

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Re:Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering by nwsm on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @02:14PM (#27133397)

The argument is that the application would be much more performant, and would handle that issue better, not necessarily avoid it.

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