Support fragmentation (pagination)

[chearon]

layout needs to know the viewport size so that it can shift lineboxes and extend block boxes as needed, I think. Then somehow painting needs to be able to paint fragments as well.

Needed for good PDF support, and needed by CellEngine.

[joelewis]

Hi @@chearon !
Fan of this project :) Are there any plans to support PDF paint backend? Just curious.

[chearon]

You can render to PDF right now if you use the default canvas backend, node-canvas. Just use createCanvas(width, height, 'png') and toBuffer('application/pdf') in place of the usual arguments. APIs here.

I want to add jsPDF or pdfjs support too, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

[joelewis]

Along these lines, seems like fragmentation work itself is pretty deep. From what I've read about chromium team's rendering engine rewrite to support fragmentation - it looks like it's better to design the codebase ground up keeping fragmentation in mind.

Going by that, seems like supporting fragmentation requires a considerable amount of code changes. What are your thoughts on this? @chearon

Thanks!

[chearon]

I've read that article and the ones in the sidebar several times! Gecko uses "continuations" which sounds a little bit easier, but I think I'm going to take a similar approach to Blink.

Because of the fact that it touches everything, I want to do fragmentation next. Definitely before tables, but I may do a few other small features first. I'm also taking a bit of a break from dropflow to work on node-canvas for a few months. So it will probably be a while, but rest assured, fragmentation is coming.