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Fix misc CoreText rendering bugs and issues with clipping and composing characters #1356

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@ychin ychin commented Jan 21, 2023

This fixes a couple outstanding CoreText rendering issues with more complicated characters. Separated them into separate commits to make the changes easier to identify.


Rename the "preserve line spacing" setting to "use macOS calculation"

The setting was added to "preserve" the font's original line spacing intents, but after further investigation I cannot find why Apple's calculation for font line spacing to be so wide. Furthermore it's quite odd because the default line spacing is wide, but the only thing that setting does is by re-initializing the font under Core Text (instead of using NSFont like the default) using CTFont and somehow the issue is fixed. Inspecting font metrics (using ttx) also didn't seem to give any hints why the spacing are so wide (e.g. ascent / descent / line gap etc all look fine). A StackOverflow comment seems to suggest that Apple is simply adding a 1.2x scale to some fonts (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5511830/how-does-line-spacing-work-in-core-text-and-why-is-it-different-from-nslayoutm) which seems to match the observation. My guess is that Apple looks at some fonts and think they are too aggressive in their font metrics design and "helpfully" introduces a 1.2x multiplier to space them out, where Core Text is lower level than AppKit and therefore does not have this auto-inflation.

By renaming the option it should make it clearer that this is a somewhat arbitrary distinction instead of it being an inherent property of the font.


Remove the ceil() call around fontDescent in Core Text renderer

I have looked and I do not believe there is a good reason to do this rounding up at all. I believe the motivation is to align the baseline with the pixel boundary, but I don't believe that is necessary, given that Core Text will properly perform the correct antialiasing for us. Most texts aren't directly aligned at the baseline anyway. Before, that ceil() option is a reason why sometimes fonts would feel pushed upwards, clipping emojis to the top, and creating a lopsided effect for fonts like Fira Code (h11), since we draw the boxes aligned to the line height at the bottom of the descender, meaning the ceil() has an effect of pushing the text up.


Fix composing characters renderered at an offset

MacVim previously didn't really render composing characters with multiple glyphs correctly. For simple ones like 'â' it would work fine because Core Text just generates one glyph for it, but for more complicated ones like 'x⃗' the renderer didn't properly query the advance of the glyphs to put them at the correct position. Refactor the logic to keep track of the current cell/glyphs and make sure to track the advances fo the glyphs so the composing chars' glyphs would be laid out properly on top of the cell.

We need to be careful with the tracking, because in Vim we force the text rendering to be monospaced, and so we maintain the tracking within a single grapheme (which can consist of multiple glyphs), but when we move to the next grapheme we reset the position so we can get proper monospaced rendering even for non-monospaced texts like CJK or stylized texts.

Fix #995
Fix #1172


Fix CoreText clipping issues with tall texts

This fixes the issue where particularly tall characters will get clipped at the row boundary. This happens because even though a font describes the line height with font metrics, individual glyphs do not have to respect them, and we can see with emoji rendering sometimes they can poke upwards past the line height. Also, it's trivially easy to construct composing characters that become really tall, e.g. "x゙̂⃗", or Tibetan scripts like "ཧཱུྃ".

To fix this, we do the following:

  1. Remove the explicit clipping call at rendering.

  2. Fix partial redraw to not lead to clipping / corruption. This is quite tricky, because let's say we have a character that is tall enough to touch other lines, if those lines are redraw but not the line with the tall char, the redraw will paint over the parts of the glyphs poking through. Alternatively if we redraw the line with the tall chars we also need to expand the redraw region to make sure other lines get repainted as well. To fix this properly, we should do a proper glyph calculation when we receive the draw command before we issue before we call setNeedsDisplayInRect, but since right now we only extract glyph info later (during drawRect call), it's too late. We just do the hacky solution by storing a variable redrawExpandRows that tracks how many lines to expand for all lines. It's a little hacky since this will affect all lines permanently regardless if they have tall characters or not. The proper fix may come later as an optimization (or when we do hardware rendering via Metal).

  3. Re-order the rendering so we have a two pass system, where we first draw the background fill color for all rows, then the text. This helps prevent things like Vim's window split or cursorline from obscuring the text.

  4. Add a preference to turn on clipping (old behavior). This helps prevent odd issues with really tall texts (e.g. Zalgo text) making it hard to see what's going on. The preference MMRendererClipToRow is not exposed in UI for now as it's a relatively niche. It will be exposed later when we have a dedicated render tab in settings.

Note that a lot of these characters only show their full height by doing set maxcombine=8 because the default (2) is quite low.

Part of the fix for #995

@ychin ychin added the Renderer Text rendering issues, including CoreText renderer label Jan 21, 2023
@ychin ychin added this to the Release 175 milestone Jan 21, 2023
@ychin ychin force-pushed the coretext-rendering-fixes-composing-chars-clipping branch from 51e60aa to 36c4629 Compare January 21, 2023 02:25
@ychin ychin mentioned this pull request Jan 21, 2023
7 tasks
@ychin ychin force-pushed the coretext-rendering-fixes-composing-chars-clipping branch from 36c4629 to bce3ca2 Compare January 29, 2023 23:14
The setting was added to "preserve" the font's original line spacing
intents, but after further investigation I cannot find why Apple's
calculation for font line spacing to be so wide. Furthermore it's quite
odd because the default line spacing is wide, but the only thing that
setting does is by re-initializing the font under Core Text (instead of
using NSFont like the default) using CTFont and somehow the issue is
fixed. Inspecting font metrics (using ttx) also didn't seem to give any
hints why the spacing are so wide (e.g. ascent / descent / line gap etc
all look fine). A StackOverflow comment seems to suggest that Apple is
simply adding a 1.2x scale to some fonts
(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5511830/how-does-line-spacing-work-in-core-text-and-why-is-it-different-from-nslayoutm)
which seems to match the observation. My guess is that Apple looks at
some fonts and think they are too aggressive in their font metrics
design and "helpfully" introduces a 1.2x multiplier to space them out,
where Core Text is lower level than AppKit and therefore does not have
this auto-inflation.

By renaming the option it should make it clearer that this is a somewhat
arbitrary distinction instead of it being an inherent property of the
font.
I have looked and I do not believe there is a good reason to do this
rounding up at all. I believe the motivation is to align the baseline
with the pixel boundary, but I don't believe that is necessary, given
that Core Text will properly perform the correct antialiasing for us.
Most texts aren't directly aligned at the baseline anyway. Before, that
ceil() option is a reason why sometimes fonts would feel pushed upwards,
clipping emojis to the top, and creating a lopsided effect for fonts
like Fira Code (h11), since we draw the boxes aligned to the line
height at the bottom of the descender, meaning the ceil() has an effect
of pushing the text up.
MacVim previously didn't really render composing characters with
multiple glyphs correctly. For simple ones like 'â' it would work fine
because Core Text just generates one glyph for it, but for more
complicated ones like 'x⃗' the renderer didn't properly query the advance
of the glyphs to put them at the correct position. Refactor the logic to
keep track of the current cell/glyphs and make sure to track the
advances fo the glyphs so the composing chars' glyphs would be laid out
properly on top of the cell.

We need to be careful with the tracking, because in Vim we force the
text rendering to be monospaced, and so we maintain the tracking within
a single grapheme (which can consist of multiple glyphs), but when we
move to the next grapheme we reset the position so we can get proper
monospaced rendering even for non-monospaced texts like CJK or stylized
texts.

Fix macvim-dev#995
Fix macvim-dev#1172
This fixes the issue where particularly tall characters will get clipped
at the row boundary. This happens because even though a font describes
the line height with font metrics, individual glyphs do not have to
respect them, and we can see with emoji rendering sometimes they can
poke upwards past the line height. Also, it's trivially easy to
construct composing characters that become really tall, e.g. "x゙̂⃗", or
Tibetan scripts like "ཧཱུྃ".

To fix this, we do the following:

1. Remove the explicit clipping call at rendering.

2. Fix partial redraw to not lead to clipping / corruption. This is
   quite tricky, because let's say we have a character that is tall
   enough to touch other lines, if those lines are redraw but not the
   line with the tall char, the redraw will paint over the parts of the
   glyphs poking through. Alternatively if we redraw the line with the
   tall chars we also need to expand the redraw region to make sure
   other lines get repainted as well. To fix this properly, we should do
   a proper glyph calculation when we receive the draw command before we
   issue before we call `setNeedsDisplayInRect`, but since right now we
   only extract glyph info later (during drawRect call), it's too late.
   We just do the hacky solution by storing a variable
   `redrawExpandRows` that tracks how many lines to expand for all
   lines. It's a little hacky since this will affect all lines
   permanently regardless if they have tall characters or not. The
   proper fix may come later as an optimization (or when we do hardware
   rendering via Metal).

3. Re-order the rendering so we have a two pass system, where we first
   draw the background fill color for all rows, then the text. This
   helps prevent things like Vim's window split or cursorline from
   obscuring the text.

4. Add a preference to turn on clipping (old behavior). This helps
   prevent odd issues with really tall texts (e.g. Zalgo text) making it
   hard to see what's going on. The preference `MMRendererClipToRow` is
   not exposed in UI for now as it's a relatively niche. It will be
   exposed later when we have a dedicated render tab in settings.

Note that a lot of these characters only show their full height by doing
`set maxcombine=8` because the default (2) is quite low.

Part of the fix for macvim-dev#995
@ychin ychin force-pushed the coretext-rendering-fixes-composing-chars-clipping branch from bce3ca2 to d1c8e61 Compare January 30, 2023 00:10
@ychin ychin merged commit 17f3c3d into macvim-dev:master Jan 30, 2023
@ychin ychin deleted the coretext-rendering-fixes-composing-chars-clipping branch January 30, 2023 01:28
ychin added a commit that referenced this pull request Feb 7, 2023
Updated to Vim 9.0.1276

Features
====================

Dictionary lookup
--------------------

You can now use Force Touch or Cmd-Ctrl-D to look up definitions of word
under the cursor (or selected text in visual mode). This will also
preview URLs, and support data types such as phone numbers and
addresses. #1312 #1313

This feature can also be invoked programmatically from VimScript (see
`:h macvim-lookup`). #1315

Tool bar / Touch Bar / menu icons
--------------------

You can now use SF Symbols for Tool bar and Touch Bar icons, including
using different symbol styles such as "palette" or "multicolor". Menu
items can now also use the `icon=` syntax to specify icons as well. See
`:help macvim-toolbar-icon` for details. #1329

The default tool bar also has updated icons to look similar to SF
Symbols used by newer macOS versions. #1214 by @sfsam

Window management actions
--------------------

There are new `macaction`'s for managing the MacVim window. The new
`zoomLeft`/`zoomRight` actions allow you to pin the window to the
left/right of the screen, and there are also new actions for interacting
with Stage Manager (requires macOS 13+). See `:h macvim-actions` for
details. #1330

Pre-release updates / Sparkle 2
--------------------

MacVim now supports pre-release software builds. It's sometimes hard for
us to release frequent updates due to the desire to pick a stable
upstream Vim version, needing to test the release on multiple OS
versions, making sure there aren't half-complete or buggy features, and
other reasons.

This new feature now allows us to push pre-release beta builds out in a
more frequent fashion, which could be useful if there are particular
features or fixes that you would like to try out before the next
official release. Pre-release builds will be released depending on bug
fixes and features instead of a fixed cadence. Do note that these
pre-release builds may not be as well-validated and may have half-baked
features.

If you are using the built-in auto-updater to update MacVim, you can
turn this on by going to Advanced settings pane, and enable "Enable
pre-release software updates".

This feature is only available for macOS 10.13 or above.

The auto-updater has also been updated from Sparkle 1.27.1 to 2.3.0 for
10.13+ builds. Legacy (10.9-10.12) builds are still using Sparkle 1.

See #1332.

New Vim features
--------------------

New `smoothscroll` option allows you to scroll through a long wrapped
line (using Ctrl-E or mouse wheel) without immediately jumping to the
next line. (v9.0.0640)

`splitscroll` option has been renamed `splitkeep`, with more flexibility
than before. (v9.0.0647)

Sound playback on macOS is now supported. You can use `has('sound')` to
check. See `help sound` for details. (v9.0.0694)

Terminals now support `:confirm` for `:q`, etc, which also means
MacVim's Cmd-W will work properly for terminal windows. (v9.0.0710)

Virtual text had numerous bugs fixed.

General
====================

Legacy build for 10.9 - 10.12
--------------------

Per a previous announcement (#1271), the default MacVim binary will now
require macOS 10.13 or above. Users of macOS 10.9 - 10.12 can use a
separate "legacy" build which will still be supported. The legacy binary
will still have the latest versions of Vim and be supported, but may not
have all the latest features (e.g. pre-release builds).

If you are using the auto-updater (Sparkle) to update MacVim, it should
"just work" and find the best version for you. If you are downloading
MacVim from the website, there is also a link to download the legacy
version marked for 10.9+ as well. If you download the normal binary
marked for 10.13+ from the website, it won't work on these older macOS
versions.

See #1331.

Fixes
====================

CoreText Renderer clipping and rendering bugs
--------------------

Unicode characters with multiple composing characters (e.g. "x⃗") will
now render correctly. #1172

Texts (e.g. Tibetan, Zalgo texts) that are taller than the line height
will no longer be clipped inappropriately. You can use a new setting
`MMRendererClipToRow` to re-enable clipping if the tall texts are
distracting. #995 / #1356

Tab crash
--------------------

Fixed a crash when opening new tabs that seems to only occur in macOS 13
Ventura. #1333

Other bugs
--------------------

- Fixed non-native full screen not working well with the notch on newer
  MacBook's when set to not show menu bar. You can also use
  `MMNonNativeFullScreenSafeAreaBehavior` to force MacVim to use the
  notch area as well if you don't mind some content being obscured. Note
  that the previous release also claimed it fixed this, but because the
  binary was built against an old macOS SDK (Big Sur), the fix did not
  work in the binary release. #1261
- Allow "Open untitled window: never" and "After last window closes:
  Quit MacVim" to be set together again. Added safeguards to make sure
  doing so won't immediately close the app. #1338
- Edit.Cut / Copy menu items will now be properly disabled when there
  isn't selected text. #1308
- Fixed potential `:emenu` crash when the menu is associated with an
  action in a non-valid mode. #1305
- Fixed bug where just bringing up the right-click (or the
  MacVim→Services) menu would somehow copy the selected texts to the
  system clipboard. #1300
- Fixed a Japanese input method bug where using left/right arrow to move
  to a different section of the input text would previously result in
  the candidate list not showing up at the correct position. #1312
- Fix non-CoreText renderer not handling text styles like strikethrough
  correctly (note: this renderer has been deprecated for a while and you
  should not use it). #1296
- This release uses an older sh/bash syntax file because the latest one
  in Vim has a bug. #1358

Misc
====================

New settings:

- "No drop shadows" (Appearance). #1301
- "Treat Ctrl-click as right-click" (Input) (#1326). This was previously
  configurable via command-line, but now also possible in the settings
  pane under the new "Input" category.

"About MacVim" now reports the version number in a clearer way with
clearly specified release number vs Vim version.

Known Issues
====================

Printing
--------------------

Printing using File→Print or `:hardcopy` is currently not working under
macOS 13 Ventura due to its removal of PostScript support in the Preview
app. This will be fixed in a later release. See the issue for
workarounds. #1347

Scripting
====================

- Scripting languages versions:
    - Perl is now built against 5.30, up from 5.18.
    - Ruby is now built against 3.2, up from 3.1.

Compatibility
====================

Requires macOS 10.9 or above. (10.9 - 10.12 requires downloading a
separate legacy build)

Script interfaces have compatibility with these versions:

- Lua 5.4
- Perl 5.30
- Python2 2.7
- Python3 3.10
- Ruby 3.2
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unicode combining characters rendering issues MacVim does not display Tibetan Text properly
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