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+<!--
+SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later
+SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2025 ai-ad4 and the FreePDFEditor contributors
+-->
+# Spike D — Skia vs PDFium renderer: M0 status (DEFERRED)
+
+* **Spike**: D — our own Skia display-list renderer vs PDFium on the corpus
+  (engineering plan §14 step 7)
+* **Date**: 2026-07-25
+* **Status**: **Deferred.** Not buildable in the M0 development environment;
+  recorded here so the deferral is explicit, not silent.
+* **Gate**: pixel divergence ≤ 0.3% between our Skia display-list renderer and
+  PDFium on 500 corpus pages — decides whether the §2.5 predictive tier is
+  viable.
+
+## Why deferred
+
+Spike D requires **our own Skia display-list renderer** (which does not exist
+yet — it is M2 work) and **PDFium** as the reference renderer. Neither is
+available as a system package on Debian 13:
+
+- **PDFium** has no system package and must be built from Chromium's
+  `pdfium` git mirror. Its build is Chromium-scale: the source is ~2 GB, the
+  build wants tens of GB of disk and produces a large static library, and a
+  full build takes hours even on capable hardware. The M0 development
+  environment here (29 GB free disk, 7.8 GB RAM) is below PDFium's practical
+  build floor.
+- **Skia** likewise has no system package and builds from Google's repo; it
+  is smaller than PDFium but still a from-source build with its own toolchain
+  (`gn` + `ninja`, depot_tools).
+
+The spike is specifically testing the divergence between **two specific
+renderers** we will use in production (§2.4: Skia for the predictive tier and
+overlays, PDFium for the authoritative raster). It cannot be substituted with
+Poppler or another renderer — that would test a different question.
+
+## What this does NOT mean
+
+- **It is not a go/no-go block on M0 for the other spikes.** Spikes A, B, C, E
+  are complete and give go signals: surgical splice validated (A),
+  reconstruction works (B), font growth works (C), sandbox works (E). The M0
+  exit criteria in §14 are met for the four spikes that could be built here.
+- **It is not an architectural risk we are ignoring.** The §2.5 predictive
+  tier is the *optimisation* that keeps keystroke latency bounded; the
+  authoritative tier (re-emit + render through PDFium) is the guarantee and
+  does not depend on the Skia renderer's existence. If Spike D later shows
+  the Skia renderer diverges too much from PDFium, the fallback is the
+  authoritative tier alone (slower keystrokes on dense pages, still correct).
+  ADR-0001 records this as the design's escape valve.
+
+## What this DOES mean / next steps
+
+- **Spike D must run on a machine with the bandwidth to build PDFium and
+  Skia** — a CI runner, a developer workstation, or a build server. It is the
+  one M0 spike that needs a heavier environment than a laptop sandbox.
+- **Before Spike D can run, the Skia display-list renderer must exist** (M2
+  work). Spike D tests *that renderer* against PDFium; without it, there is
+  nothing to compare. So D is naturally a late-M0 / early-M2 activity, not a
+  pure M0 spike — it depends on M2's L3 renderer.
+- **The pixel-diff harness scaffolding is already in place**
+  (`ci/pixel-diff/run_pixel_diff.py`) with the CLI/JSON contract and `--noop`
+  mode. When the Skia renderer and PDFium are available, the harness fills in
+  the real `render_page` and `compare_png` stubs. That work is M2, not blocked
+  by this deferral.
+
+## Reproducing (when the environment allows)
+
+```bash
+# Build PDFium ( Chromium's pdfium repo — hours, ~tens of GB):
+#   git clone https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium.git
+#   cd pdfium && ./build/install-build-deps.sh && gn gen out/Default && ninja -C out/Default pdfium
+# Build Skia:
+#   git clone https://skia.googlesource.com/skia.git && cd skia && python tools/git-sync-deps
+#   gn gen out/Default && ninja -C out/Default
+# Then wire them into spike/D_renderer/ and run the pixel-diff harness.
+```
+
+This is left as the next step for an environment with the build bandwidth.
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