Issues with Scintilla for Qt Qt reports character descenders are 1 pixel shorter than they really are. There is a tweak in the code to add a pixel in. This may have to be reviewed for Qt 5. There's a comment in the Qt code for Windows: // ### we subtract 1 to even out the historical +1 in QFontMetrics's // ### height=asc+desc+1 equation. Fix in Qt5. The clocks used aren't great. QTime is a time since midnight clock so wraps around and is only accurate to, at best, milliseconds. On macOS drawing text into a pixmap moves it around 1 pixel to the right compared to drawing it directly onto a window. Buffered drawing turned off by default to avoid this. Reported as QTBUG-19483. Only one QPainter can be active on any widget at a time. Scintilla only draws into one widget but reenters for measurement.