skija VS KeenWrite

I think IntelliJ was built on Swing and predates JavaFX… however, I’m curious if they’ve got plans to integrate their Skia integration work that backs desktop compose: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija

Maybe the story is not finished yet. New approaches like JetBrain's Compose (https://www.jetbrains.com/de-de/lp/compose-mpp/) with a React inspired programming model might bring some new interest to the platform. Then there is a Java binding library for Skia (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija), and JavaFX is also alive and high quality.

As everyone is used to fat Electron apps now, Java applications (especially compiled and packed with new JDK features) might be refreshing.

I think it's the core, the 2D engine, just never got the love it needed to be a great place to start. Nobody seemed to prioritize making that happen.

Like, the antialiasing was noticably fuzzy. I never found an applet that looked like it belonged on the webpage. And when I built a few, it was a lot of work to even get font rendering to not be horrendous. And even then, you'd see what the browser rendered vs what the applet rendered and they were always off. I remember using images instead of font rendering sometimes.

So, if you made a swing app, it was easy to put together, but hard to make look "professional".

By the time of the Oracle acquisition, I'm pretty sure everyone just realized "the browser won" and that's why we just had JavaFX get broken off the platform and basically put out to pasture. But it's not like much went into the core platform itself to make building great UIs easy. The underlying 2D rendering just never worked efficiently.

I mean, even today, there's some serious performance issues with IntelliJ on 4k monitors with scaling. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

When I look at where JetBrains is going, it sure seems like they are building on top of a better 2D engine, in this case, skia: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija.

Under the covers it uses Skija which is a java wrapper for Skia which is a C++ 2D graphics engine (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija)

You can take a look at Skija from Jetbrains. It's a wrapper around the Skia library used by Chrome, Xamarin, LibreOffice, among others.

Technically, the bot is written in Kotlin using Ktor and Koin. It's a single endpoint web service, listening for Telegram Bot API webhooks. Text is drawn using Oswald font (I need Cyrillic, not supported in Anton) with Skija library, a Java wrapper for Skia, a 2D library powering your phone and browser. It is really cool and next time you need to make something with graphics, consider using Skia and its wrapper for your language. Next, generated images are upload to Imgur via its API (the documentation could be better). The whole thing is running on a free VM in Oracle Cloud. So, yeah, next time you need to host something lightweight — check out their offering. Oracle also provides a free DB instance, which I'm using to cache the links. Monitoring: Grafana Cloud (also free). Deployments: GitHub Actions + Ansible. So it didn't cost me a penny, except for ~50 hours of coding in two weeks on the evenings.

KeenWrite is my free, open-source, cross-platform desktop Markdown editor that can produce beautifully typeset PDFs. I started working on it years ago to help write a novel that has a complex timeline and I couldn't find a text editor that would allow me to integrate a character sheet with the story itself.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

Tutorials:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Here's what I mean by using variables directly:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCqe3A5dFg

CommonMark doesn't propose a standard for bibliographic references. Would anyone find the editor more appealing if it had cross-references and citations?

My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

[1]: https://kroki.io/

[2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

Although not interactive, I've created a video series that shows advanced usage of Markdown. Namely R, external variables, diagrams, math, annotations, and a different approach to metadata:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Tutorial 4 shows basic Markdown:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNbGSiRzx-0

The top-right of each video shows keyboard and mouse clicks to help follow along.[1] My desktop text editor, KeenWrite[2], is used in the tutorials.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/kmcaster

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/main/scripts/bu...

My template script provides a way to make user-friendly shell scripts. In a script that uses the template, you define the dependencies and their sources:

    DEPENDENCIES=(

I didn't create the fork, nor am I affiliated with the project. I use it in my text editor, KeenWrite to rasterize SVG.

KeenWrite Themes[1] are instructions that tell ConTeXt how to typeset XHTML documents (content) into PDF files (presentation). I made a tutorial that shows how my FOSS desktop text editor, KeenWrite[3], allows users to write in Markdown to typeset a document against a particular theme.

Before it can be used for scientific papers, it needs cross-references, which, unfortunately, aren't part of the CommonMark specification.

I posit that the vast majority of LaTeX users don't grok how to separate content from presentation. When I asked a question on TeX.SE about how to adjust the line spacing between enumerated items (spanning a couple dozen enumerated lists), the vast majority of people voted for the answer of using `\itemsep0em` to tweak each list ... individually.[4] The correct answer, IMO, is to fix the problem globally, and not waste time tweaking individual lists.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

[4]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6081/reduce-space-be...