Server Side Rendering (SSR) support

[ericbf]

Hello there! We were trying to use pretext to measure text in a server component, but there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to do that? We’re using NextJS, have canvas installed, and just wanted to get some measurements done on the server side for pre-rendering.

Is there a straightforward way to measure text in the SSR context of a NextJS (or any SSR) application?

[bg-l2norm]

Done in #126

[qb20nh]

Sorry if I'm missing the point entirely, but pretext already has to do a fair amount of nontrivial work to align canvas and DOM metrics within a single browser environment. Moving that measurement to a different OS, runtime, text stack, and canvas implementation seems to make that alignment problem materially harder.

[ericbf]

Sorry if I'm missing the point entirely, but pretext already has to do a fair amount of nontrivial work to align canvas and DOM metrics within a single browser environment. Moving that measurement to a different OS, runtime, text stack, and canvas implementation seems to make that alignment problem materially harder.

The point is pretty straightforward – to get a measurement of text during pre-rendering to prevent layout shift on the frontend. Never said it was going to be simple. It may be a matter of a "best guess" situation and then tweaks on mount on the client side.