Won't this end up in Apple iBooks or whatever it's called now? Most novels can be a megabyte or more of text, pretty much all of it needing to be wrapped.
It seems more likely that Apple would've adapted this from the proven technology that they currently use for Apple Books and everything else, TextKit (which first appeared in OpenStep). https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10061/
> Apple Books and everything else
Can't speak to Apple Books, but at least Pages.app (and iWork in general) use a separate text engine from TextKit, focused on higher fidelity at the cost of performance -- optical kerning, etc. (Terminal.app also does not use TextKit.)
Doubtful.
OpenStep used Display Postscript and was written in Objective-C; WebKit is written in C++.
Rendering text on the web is a different animal all together.
I was under the impression that when we got new css in Safari, in the next software cycle those same features ended up in Books. It wouldn't make sense to give it a different rendering engine... but then I've never been able to find much in the way of which epub readers used which rendering engines anywhere.
I mean, not wrong. But optimizing over a megabyte's worth of text is almost certainly not going to take a lot of time. Especially as there will be chapter stops. Such that we are down to, what 100k of text per chapter to layout?
Again, I won't claim it is absolutely free. It is almost certainly negligible in terms of processing power involved with any of the things we are talking about.