Fonts (was Re: [etoys-dev] Wording in Clouds)

[Andreas Raab]

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> TTF files use a rather space-efficient delta coding for glyph shapes. 
> When importing the font into the Squeak image, this is expanded to 
> discreet bezier curves, which is the format our vector renderer 
> understands natively.

Okay, I'll sign up for fixing that. The history of the Truetype fonts is 
such that the original implementation was not intended for screen text 
but rather for generating 3D text in Wonderland. It was only later that 
Yoshiki figured out how to get that stuff going to make screen fonts out 
of it. Unfortunately, the desire to deal with the actual glyphs for 3D 
stuff led to reading in the entire file instead of defining a more 
deferred interface.

What I can do is to change the font reader to only read the bits that 
are necessary to render a particular glyph and then either leave the 
entire TTF file externally or read the file into memory for caching. In 
any case, the data won't get expanded unless you are actually rendering 
that glyph on screen.

Cheers,
   - Andreas