tracking

Monday 23 August 2010

Line-numbers in squint - how hard could it be?

It should have been simple right? Just add another richtextbox alongside the code-window, fill it with numbers and then find some way to synchronise the scroll position of the two windows. Probably about an hour's work.  WRONG - so this is what actually happened....

  • Add the new line-number text-box (after creating yet another splitter panel for it to live in)
  • Fill it with numbers (as a quick hack we just go from 1 to 10000) and make sure we're using the same font as the codeview so the line-spacing is the same.
  • Try to synchronise them.... I know, I'll use the tried-and-trusted method of get the character index of the top-left corner, working out the line-number and then scrolling to the caret.  Unfortunately the results are horrible - richtextbox has it's own semi-random algorithm for deciding how far into the visible region the caret will be so the line-numbers are just not lining up at all.
  • A bit of googling later, I find some neat code that allows me to scroll down some number of lines. It means I have to abandon my 'members-only' principles and start using SendMessage but what-the-hell if it works....
  • ...only it doesn't.  Fortunately further googling reveals another approach using yet more nasty sendmessaging but by this time I no longer feel dirty about using it.  (Did I mention the diversion involved in trying to figure out how to use IntPtrs -back in my day we had physical and virtual memory but as usual Microsoft has taken a simple concept and put their own spin on it - don't get me started on their crappy Mutex API....) Anyway, fortunately the new approach of reading the scrollpos of the codewindow and simply setting the line-number scrollpos to the same value works like a charm.  Now I can whizz up and down in the code window with the line-numbers beautifully synchronised.  This has all taken less than a couple of hours and I'm feeling pretty cocky about showing this off and moving on to the next feature...
  • EXCEPT....
  • As I'm starting to look at implementing 'undo' I notice some of the lines aren't quite lined up with the line-numbers.  Double-checking that both textboxes are using the same zoomfactor and fontsize shows that they _should_ be using identical line-heights so this is very odd.
  • First theory - maybe using characters with descenders like ; or } causes that line to be higher ? I briefly contemplate the horrible idea that I will have to frig every line-number to match the height of the particular codewindow line it is supposed to line up with. The good news though is that it doesn't seem to have anything to do with descenders after all, just adding one more character to the line makes it grow in height.
  • The bad news though is that I can't figure out why. On closer inspection things are even weirder. As soon as I add a single character to the end of a line the font visibly 'grows' slightly as if it's being bolded. It's this effect which means the line heights in the codewindow are ever-so-slightly different from those in the line-number window.  Thus begins a descent into frustration and near madness that lasts nearly four hours....
  • I become convinced after some time that the problem has something to do with rich-text.  Squint uses an 'offline' rendering mechanism because marking up large files can take an appreciable amount of time (some portion of a second).  Therefore I construct a new richtextbox in a background thread, copy the text into it, mark it up with all those colours then copy back the rendered rich-text into the code-window. Somehow that round trip process is causing the rendered text to 'swell' when it's copied into the code window.   (It's probably useful to mention at this point that I have already had terrible problems with richtextbox.ZoomFactor which tends to reset itself at the slightest provocation and which can also cause font resizing during this process so there is some time involved in making sure that is not the problem here.)   I start breakpointing the copyRendering function I've made and doing a byte-by-byte comparison of the richtext being copied in versus what as there before. Needless to say there are some significant differences so I look up the rtf spec and read that for a while before deciding it would be quicker to write some code to try to massage the differences away before doing the copy. Then if I can find out which difference is causing the problem I can go away and read up the spec to figure out what I might do to fix this properly.
  • ...Some time later most of the differences have been successively .Replaced out and I'm feeling confident that the answer must be close. And yes... finally the rendered text doesn't 'swell' anymore.  Excitedly I comment out the substitution to allow the difference back in again so I can check this really is the one and.... err, wait a minute it's still not swelling even though it did a minute ago. WTF?!?!?  I go back and forth a few times before reluctantly concluding that however heavily I massage the incoming richtext string, I can't make this problem go away for good and the last hour or so has been a complete waste of time.  This also raises the frightening possibility that there is some persistent state in the richtextbox control that I am somehow corrupting with this background-render and copy trick -not a good thought at all.  
  • In some desperation I start all over again, this time disabling the zoomfactor-fudging completely and lo-and-behold I don't get the swelling.  Strange, I think but by this point I'm past caring and the easiest solution seems to be to to find some way to disable mousewheel zoom and leave the zoomfactor at 1.  Only the RichTextBox doesn't let you do that (by now I would gladly track down the author of this component and discuss his 'design' decisions with the blunt end of my laptop) so I'm stuck. 
  • Until.. more googling says the answer to this problem may be to create a subclassed variant and filter out the mousewheel events.  I don't really like the idea of doing this but hey, I tend to be a bit stubborn and having come this far I figure the extra effort is worth it even if I never actually saw the point of line-numbers in the first place
  • So a bit later I have my subclassed variant, I'm filtering out the mousewheel events but as an act of generousity to those who do like to zoom in and out of windows I implement a 'fake' zoom which simply changes the size of the font in the two windows to make it look like your're zooming.
  • Blimey - it all seems to work now and once again I'm preparing for a release. It was a lot of headbanging and frustration but I'm feeling that sense of accomplishment that comes from pushing through what looked like an insoluble problem.
  • BUT then.. no, it can't be.... the misaligned lines are back! Right now I can't believe that all that work to rip out half the guts of the UI and replace it with a new custom class has made no difference whatsoever.  I briefly consider throwing the laptop out of the window and cancelling squint development but decide to take 10 minutes out to walk around and get my head together instead.
  • Which helps, because once I make that decision and start thinking about what could possibly be left that I haven't tried, the solution starts to come together. Clearly it has something  to do with zoomfactors and fonts - I don't  always see the problem, in fact the more I look at it the more I realise it only occurs at certain levels of zoom.  Hmm, both zoomfactors and font sizes are specified as floating-point numbers - maybe there is some kind of rounding error causing the two textboxes to use ever-so-slightly-different sizes?
  • I implement some code to clamp the zoomed font size to an integer size and now the problem has gone away .... getting warmer.
  • And then,  finally,  I figure out what must be happening.  The text in the 'offline' rendering richtextbox is being rendered at a font size of 23.75 (to pick a random example).  When I copy the rtf from that textbox to the codewindow, the subtlety of the non-integer font size is getting lost and it's being rounded up to the next integer, 24.  Perhaps rtf can't express non-integer fontsizes, perhaps it's a bug in richtextbox ? I don't care.  I'm happy that the problem is solved.
  • EXCEPT... no 'except' this time, it really is solved :)

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