Freetype2

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Sun Sep 3 00:49:18 UTC 2000


"Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> is widely believed to have written:

> 
> > 2.  We are also looking at FreeType, and other schemes (such as a simple set of primitives that would allow Squeak to tap any font accesible in your OS).
[snip]
> I'm worried that Squeak's portability might start eroding if we use
> primitives that vary widely from OS to OS.  Just shipping a larger set
> of standard fonts would seam to solve the main problems while avoiding
> this possibility.
>
Eek. Take look sometime at the trouble VW has to go through to use host
fonts. I _really_ doubt anyone actually wants to go down that route.

Simplicity is best for Squeak. Whilst tools to take assorted platform's
fonts and make bitmaps from them might very well be useful to make
bitmaps for the image, handling _all_ the stuff on _every_ platform is a
lot of work.
If anyone feels up to making a good font rendering engine with bitmap
caching that can use one or other outline font data, that would be
really nice. Dynamically rendering each character from an outline every
time would probably be a little sub-optimal. No need to render every
char from the font all in one go either; it's rare that you use every
character in every font. Maybe render at four-times wanted size and then
subsample to provide sub-pixel forms for really fine layout resolution.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: IA: Illogical And





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