Hello WICG,

Microsoft has put together an explainer for a method to leverage the UA's ability to compute line-breaking of formatted text runs in scenarios where the DOM is not directly usable or available. The API takes advantage of the UA's layout engine to address many of the subtle complexities of text layout that make implementing line-breaking of formatted text a complex task in JavaScript. For example, properly handling international text, bidi, text shaping, etc. (see the explainer for more detail).

We would like to have the WICG community join us in reviewing this proposal, and would like to move it soon into an incubation as it is generating interest from web developers and some partners that originally suggested the idea.

The proposal currently is targeted for Canvas text layout scenarios, but we anticipate generalizing some of the concepts to harmonize and be potentially shared with the Houdini Layout API and potentially other platform areas in which this capability could be useful in the future.