render_page_forward discarded new_pos on the failure path, but a block that
only partially fitted has still advanced the position: paragraph_layouter
reports the word it stopped at, and _layout_paragraph_on_page packs it into
new_pos. Dropping it told the caller no progress was made, so navigation
dead-ended on any paragraph larger than a single page - the reader saw "end of
document" mid-book.
A 2877-word paragraph at 800x600 rendered 26 lines and reported the start
position back; it now paginates across 12 pages.
Also guard the navigation loop: EreaderManager.next_page treats no-progress as
end-of-document, which is only correct at the actual end. Anywhere else it now
logs the offending block index and skips that block, so a future layout bug
costs one block rather than the rest of the book.
Twelve specs covering the defects found auditing the block/table rendering
path, plus the pagination dead-end and the broken background renderer.
Each spec carries a reproduction of the defect against 2a543d0, a design with
concrete signatures, and acceptance criteria. Five design invariants are stated
up front so future changes can be rejected by reference rather than re-argued.
Rendering a page re-measured and re-rasterised the same words constantly: at
1404x1872 a page issued ~2800 textlength calls and ~2500 draw.text calls for
fewer than 1000 distinct (font, string) pairs. Profiling a page turn showed
FreeType glyph rendering at 57% of total time and width measurement at 38% of
layout.
Both are now cached. Measured on Crime and Punishment at 1404x1872, one page:
layout 35ms -> 19ms
render 84ms -> 41ms
total 120ms -> 60ms
Eviction ranks by use count rather than recency. Word frequency in prose is
Zipfian and stationary, so the words worth keeping are the ones used most, and
unlike recency this lets a document's own frequencies be seeded up front --
see prewarm_caches(). Two details keep the policy from costing more than it
saves, since get() runs once per word drawn:
- counting is O(1) with no reordering, because structures that reorder on
every hit measured 3-5ms/page slower than the hit rate they bought;
- eviction samples 8 entries and drops the least used of those, rather than
maintaining a global order.
Aging (halving all counts periodically) is on by default. Without it a font
size change drove the hit rate to 0% on a real access trace: every key was new
and the previous size's entries held counts nothing could beat.
Both caches are bounded, since the glyph bitmaps reach ~19MB over a long
session and the target is a 512MB Pi Zero 2. Defaults are 4MB of bitmaps and
8192 widths; configure_text_caches() tunes them. Cache size barely affects
speed (2MB is within 13% of unbounded) because a miss costs only one ~44us
rasterisation, so the bound can be set for memory, not throughput.
EreaderLayoutManager.prewarm_caches() counts the book's word frequencies and
preloads the most common ones, seeding each with its document frequency. This
moves that rasterisation to open time and cut misses by 27%, for ~15% faster
page turns at a one-off ~300ms cost. It is opt-in; nothing calls it yet.
Rendering is no longer bit-identical. PIL positions text at sub-pixel offsets,
so the cache buckets that phase, defaulting to 2 buckets per axis. Total ink
per page is unchanged and the mean pixel difference is 3.6/255 -- a fifth of
one step of a 16-level e-ink panel. subpixel_steps=4 halves that if wanted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>