Apple's little shocker also hinted his platform
Just last week we presented a report about Apple advancing the design of a possible future Post-PC hybrid system. We also noted that it was Steve Jobs who made this term of "Post PC era" extremely popular within the tech community. A recent Forest Research related blog presented an interesting overview of what they feltthe term Post-PC era really meant and this week a new patent application from Apple had a surprising revelation that they were working on a new platform independent word processor application. Whether this will be represented by their already standing Pages App is not yet known but it would stand to reason that it would be. Apple's little shocker also hinted that their platform independent code could go far beyond just word processing. This could be Apple's new internet strategy that thrusts more of us into the next phase of what is now known as the Post-PC era. In my view, this breakthrough could be a game changer.
The Problem to Solve
The recent proliferation of web browsers and computer networks has made it easy to display the same document on different computing platforms. However, inconsistencies in the way fonts are rendered across different computing platforms could cause the same document to be rendered differently for users of different computing platforms. More specifically, for a given font, the way in which metrics for various font features are interpreted, such as character height, width, leading and white space, can differ between computing platforms. These differences in interpretation could cause individual characters in a document to be rendered at different locations, which could ultimately cause the words in a document to be positioned differently between lines and pages on different computing platforms.
This inconsistent rendering could be a problem for people who are collaborating on a document. For example, if one collaborator points out an error on a specific line of a specific page, another collaborator viewing the same document on a different computing platform may have to first locate the error on a different line of a different page.
Hence, what is needed is a technique for providing consistent rendering for documents across different computer systems and computing platforms.
Apple's Solution
Some embodiments presented in Apple's patent application describe a system that typesets and renders a document in a platform-independent manner. During operation, the system first obtains the document, wherein the document includes text content and associated style information including one or more fonts. The system also generates platform-independent font metrics for the one or more fonts, wherein the platform-independent font metrics include information that could be used to determine the positions of individual characters in a rendering of the document. Next, the system uses the platform-independent font metrics to determine how the document is divided into line fragments and pages. Finally, the system uses the determined division while rendering the document, so that the division of the document into line fragments and pages is the same across different computing platforms.
In some embodiments, the system operates within a platform-independent word-processing application that operates within a web browser.
In some embodiments, the system operates within a web browser.
In some embodiments, while using the platform-independent font metrics to determine how the document is divided into line fragments and pages, the system determines the locations of individual characters within the line fragments in the rendering of the document.
In some embodiments, rendering the document involves performing a high-fidelity rendering, which uses the determined division of the document into line fragments and pages and renders individual characters at the determined locations within the line fragments.
In some embodiments, rendering the document involves performing a lower-fidelity rendering, which uses the determined division of the document into line fragments and pages. However, unlike the high-fidelity rendering, this lower-fidelity rendering does not use the determined locations for the individual characters, but instead allows the renderer to use platform-specific rendering mechanisms to determine the locations of the individual characters within the line fragments.
In some embodiments, rendering the document involves first generating code in a platform-independent markup language, which specifies the rendering for the document, and then executing the generated code to render the document.
In some embodiments, rendering the document involves rendering only a visible portion of the document.
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