Shortcut guide v2 - WinUI3 body

[enricogior]

SVG support in D2D is lacking:

• we need to use paths to render text
• we cannot detect position of the rendered elements

Those make working with SVG a chore, especially placing dynamic elements. We should switch to software rendered content.

[crutkas]

i would like better understanding on this. SVG solves a lot of crispness and sizing issues.

[bzoz]

There are a couple of issues with using SVG:

One is that Direct2D SVG support does not include <text> tags. We need to convert those to paths like in this 0.svg. This makes editing the labels hard.

Secondly, while the SVG is static, there are dynamic elements. We blink the key icons when the corresponding key is pressed. This requires that the key element in the SVG has a specific id - not a hard thing to do but one that requires some manual checking.

Secondly, we are scaling and transposing the SVG to fit various screen sizes and orientations, and there is no way to get the final location of the elements on the screen. This leads to some hackish code that finds the correct placement for WinKey + arrows tooltips.

On the other hand, rendering everything is ourselves is not hard, we already have some of the text elements dynamic. It would also allow us to have the list configurable (and also easy to localize). Since that would be a major rewrite, we wanted to combine that with switching to the Composition APIs.

[crutkas]

I think we should come up with a game plan for v2 as this stuff should be localized and people want configuration ability here.

[enricogior]

Moving away from SVG makes localization possible as for any other part of PowerToys that uses strings from resources.
For the Shortcut Guide localization there are extra steps since different localized versions have different keys, so it's not just a question of localizing the text, it will require to create maps to match the correct keys.

[bzoz]

The keys could be stored with their descriptions in the resource file - e.g. [D] Display and hide the desktop would render the D as a key and the rest as a label.

[enricogior]

We may consider it, but I'm not sure it's a best way to maintain the resource files, since each locale would have it's own values that are not strictly translations.

[crutkas]

xref #890 for look/feel.

[crutkas]

Note, this is so stuff is generated via a JSON file and create the UX, not stuff is user configurable. Configuration is future work

[crutkas]

closing this against #890