MXE and Qt 5.9.0

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 31 July 2017 at 12:02, Robert Helling <helling at atdotde.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 31. Jul 2017, at 01:24, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> I will give this a try,
> The other thing that I was thinking about was "why do we need WebKit?"
> So part of the argument for keeping WebKit was that WebEngine can't be cross
> built on Windows.
> But then the question becomes, why do we need either?
>
> Right now we have two things that need this functionality: Facebook and
> Printing.
> The Facebook support really isn't all that complicated and it seems
> ridiculous to have a huge monstrosity like WebKit (27MB on Windows) as part
> of our binary for that. It's literally 20% of the size of our binary (btw:
> the second largest piece is icudt56 at 25MB... yikes)
> Printing is more complicated. I'm not quite sure how much we really need to
> have WebKit for that - I remember that you said earlier, Lubomir, that the
> layout code very much needs some WebKit functionality. But the question
> seems worth asking - what features do we actually need? What would it take
> to implement them differently?
>
> Because quite frankly, I think we'd be better off without needing either
> WebKit or WebEngine...
>
>
> just a quick reminder of why besides the windows problem we currently cannot
> give up webkit in favour of webengine: The way page breaks are currently
> implemented in pricing uses webkit technology. This come from the fact that
> from its origin html (and its rendering) is not aware of page breaks. So we
> put more and more in a page until it flows over than roll back and print and
> continue. For the adding more and rolling back, we are accessing elements of
> the html syntax tree via tags. And those (“find me the next <p> element!”)
> are not available in web engine. In the documentation it says you are
> supposed to do such things in a javascript. Except so far, nobody has
> rewritten our logic in javascript (and I would have to learn that language
> before I could attempt that).
>

yeah, i was about to start on the WebEngine port but the Windows /
Mingw problem with building WebEngine is a major showstopper.
we can use the DOM / JS function getElementsByTagName() to find page
breaks and such a call can be made from the C++ side using
QWebEngine's QWebChannel.

> I agree that the one Facebook page that we need to display is so simple we
> could probably get away without an html renderer. But printing… once things
> got even worse, at some point, it might be easier to bundle TeX… (ahem).
>

i must admit i was fond of the TeX idea.
my understanding is that we went with HTML since more users know how
to use it and because TeX had a big footprint (100MB?).

lubomir
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