[platform-ui-dev] Powerful and easy way to testing text

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

As we're having fun with StyledText and editors these days, some of us contributors have had discussions about how to test things.

I'd like to share with you a simple and powerful approach to test Text rendering (in a widget, in an editor, wherever): using an OCR like Tesseract.

I've tried the following:

* Open a Java editor with codeminings enabled

* Took a screenshot of the editor (cropped to remove ruler and keep only text)

* then ran from CLI `tesseract /path/to/screenshot.png stdout -psm 6` and got as output a string that matches almost perfectly the text in the editor; more particularly showing the codeminings were rendered and read properly.

I think it's an extremely powerful way to do rendering test for StyledText and the family (editors, code minings...).

Would is seem acceptable to start adopting such OCR-based tests where needed in Platform? I really think it's 1000 times worth it.

Cheers,

--

Mickael Istria

Eclipse IDE developer, for Red Hat Developers