Re: Drawing UI elements behind text

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 11/10/2024 11:22 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Once the display engine knows at what X coordinate the image slice
> should start, it can stop laying out other display elements and switch
> to the slice when that X coordinate is reached.

I was thinking more about the Y coordinates and having gaps between 
consecutive slices if we made a mistake. That's probably fixable, but it 
seems like it would require a lot of care to avoid bugs.

>> Or what about applying text scaling?
> 
> How is this different from what we do today when text-scaling happens
> in a buffer where images are displayed together with text?

I'm just worried about this due to seeing some similar bugs come up in 
the visual-wrap-prefix-mode code.

>> I suppose if we deemed this feature important, we could probably address
>> all of those, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
> 
> What alternative do we have?  Showing the images alongside text
> without letting the images scroll with the text (vertically and
> horizontally) will not fly.  How do you scroll the images with the
> text except by displaying them as part of the "normal" display layout?

Personally, I'm ok with saying we just don't support laying out images 
like this in EWW. For it to have a practical effect, we'd probably need 
to have more-complete CSS support anyway. That's not easy either (though 
I have some ideas about how we could do it if we thought it would be 
worthwhile).