Writing
Notes from the work
What I find while building: measured, with the numbers.
Microsoft's own spec for 3D lighting is turned 90 degrees
Office's specification lists exactly where its 3D lights point. Draw them as written and the highlights land in the wrong place. Turn them a quarter turn and everything matches.
Thousands of real files, one score
How I measure whether the renderer really looks like Office. Office's own PDFs as the reference, a Windows PC doing the exports, and a score for every file. Tonight it's at 89.3.
The PDF should be the page you're looking at
For months every PDF in the product came from a second program. This week the PDF finally prints what the screen draws.
Measuring the camera behind Office's 3D pie charts
Office never says how it draws a 3D pie. But its PDFs contain the picture, and a picture of a cylinder gives away the camera that took it.
PowerPoint fits SmartArt by guessing, and you can see it in the numbers
SmartArt doesn't calculate the size that fits. It searches for it, halving the gap each step, and stops when it's close enough. That leaves fingerprints.
PowerPoint kerns SmartArt text with a 1990s table
Getting SmartArt text to fit like it does in PowerPoint came down to one rule I never found written anywhere. Kerning starts at 12 pt, and it uses the font's old kern table.
I wrote a JPEG XR codec for one PowerPoint feature
PowerPoint quietly keeps the original of every edited picture in a format almost nothing reads. So yesterday I finished a decoder and an encoder in plain JavaScript.
My browser tab opens almost anything now
Once slides worked without a server, I got curious about what else a tab can open by itself. Old Word files, iPhone photos, mail, ebooks, archives.
Drawing a document in fonts you don't have
Most Office documents ask for fonts a browser doesn't have and can't legally ship. This week I found a way to stand in for them without the text reflowing.
There's a whole PDF hidden inside this Word for Mac picture
Pasted charts and logos in Office files are often EMF, a Windows format no browser can draw. The ones from Word for Mac carry a surprise.
PowerPoint is my answer key now
With LibreOffice out of the picture I need a new reference. PowerPoint's own PDF export states almost everything it does, if you read it closely.
I put LibreOffice in the browser, and by the evening it was gone
Yesterday a full office suite booted in a browser tab. A few hours later my own JavaScript drew the same slides, with zero differences, 275 times faster.
I just want a PDF that looks right
My fundraising tool for non-profits keeps producing PDFs that don't match the slides. Tomorrow I'm trying something different.