Folks -
I just finished a bit of work for supporting Truetype fonts directly from disk which will make it quite a bit easier to support non-latin languages. If you update your 3.10.2-trunk image, you will get support for TTFileDescription which is polymorphic with TTFontDescription but leaves the files on disk instead of reading them into memory and wasting tons of space. The attached picture shows a couple of Squeak Wikipedia entries rendered in Batang (a standard font on Windows which is 16MB on disk and would be, oh, I don't know, *big* if loaded into memory ;-)
One of the nice effects is that because the files are left on disk, you can access your native platform fonts virtually for free (except that it affects portability of the image). The font menu in text morphs (Cmd-k/Alt-k) has consequently been extended to include a "More (non-portable) Fonts..." entry which now gives you access to all of the TTFs that we can find. The current list of search paths for fonts is hardcoded in TTFontDescription>>fontPathsDo: - if we're missing some, please add them in (this was mostly guesswork).
An open question at this point to me is what the right combination of fonts for the next release might be. As far as I can tell, we have three basic choices: 1) Ship all the fonts with the image. Either Vera and friends in-memory, or Dejavu on disk. Nice and self-contained, but eats space. 2) Use all the fonts on the platform. Drop Vera and instead give people access to local fonts. Compact, but makes images less portable. 3) Do some combo of having a certain set of fonts in the image, for example Vera for basic LGC coverage and use platform fonts for the rest. Compact and portable unless you need the extended fonts.
Any preferences? Opinions? Also, I'm interested in finding fonts that don't work. Those of you who have "interesting" fonts / scripts, if you could run a
TTFileDescription loadAllFontFiles.
to see if any of them blow up, that would be greatly appreciated. And of course any other comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome.
Cheers, - Andreas
