I strongly agree with this. In particular the Rust GUI libraries I've looked at have text layout / rendering that is nowhere near what should be considered adequate today (imo).
For example egui:
- It doesn't do any bidi reordering.
- It also doesn't do any font fallback so even if you didn't need bidi you can't render many languages without first acquiring an appropriate font somehow.
- Complex shaping is nowhere to be seen either.
- egui's italics look really terrible and I'm not sure why since I can't believe even synthesized ones have to look that bad.
CSS has been doing this for years and it's been doing it very well. So I am kind of disappointed that we don't have equally powerful tools in the general Rust ecosystem. Even just considering text layout / rendering libraries, only `cosmic-text` has an API that is somewhat in the right direction[1], but even it fails simply because I don't see a way to insert a button (block element) in-between the text[2].
Note that I'm not just hating on egui here, egui is amazing. Afaict it is the most complete GUI library for Rust and it's great to be able to make GUIs this easily. However I can't just not point out that it is, in fact, not perfect and doesn't truly "excel" at GUIs.
Also I have no idea how inline layout looks in other established GUI libraries like GTK and Qt so maybe I'm complaining about something that is not available most places outside a browser. If anyone knows, it would be interesting to learn how well they compare here.
[1] CSS inline layout is so complex that even this is a decent achievement, since it is not reasonable to expect most CSS features out of new Rust libraries with a significant time disadvantage.
[2] This is non-trivial because bidi reordering should happen on the whole paragraph not only on both sides of the button, so the inline layout API must handle non-text blocks in text.
This is a detail oriented list of real issues, which is wonderful! ChatGPT found open issues in the egui Github for each of your problems, so they're known about and being worked on.
However, it seems like most of the other UI toolkits discussed here, even in other languages, suffer similar issues. Which points to the difficulty of the problems. Consequently, I don't have any problem praising egui and Rust alongside. They're great! And even great can always get better! :)
I strongly agree with this. In particular the Rust GUI libraries I've looked at have text layout / rendering that is nowhere near what should be considered adequate today (imo).
For example egui:
- It doesn't do any bidi reordering.
- It also doesn't do any font fallback so even if you didn't need bidi you can't render many languages without first acquiring an appropriate font somehow.
- Complex shaping is nowhere to be seen either.
- egui's italics look really terrible and I'm not sure why since I can't believe even synthesized ones have to look that bad.
CSS has been doing this for years and it's been doing it very well. So I am kind of disappointed that we don't have equally powerful tools in the general Rust ecosystem. Even just considering text layout / rendering libraries, only `cosmic-text` has an API that is somewhat in the right direction[1], but even it fails simply because I don't see a way to insert a button (block element) in-between the text[2].
Note that I'm not just hating on egui here, egui is amazing. Afaict it is the most complete GUI library for Rust and it's great to be able to make GUIs this easily. However I can't just not point out that it is, in fact, not perfect and doesn't truly "excel" at GUIs.
Also I have no idea how inline layout looks in other established GUI libraries like GTK and Qt so maybe I'm complaining about something that is not available most places outside a browser. If anyone knows, it would be interesting to learn how well they compare here.
[1] CSS inline layout is so complex that even this is a decent achievement, since it is not reasonable to expect most CSS features out of new Rust libraries with a significant time disadvantage.
[2] This is non-trivial because bidi reordering should happen on the whole paragraph not only on both sides of the button, so the inline layout API must handle non-text blocks in text.