At 13:59 -0800 2/2/01, John M McIntosh wrote:
>Since I'm building a new macintosh VM, I thought I'd better ask if there are any macintosh specific features that anyone would want to be added. (Not that I really have time to add large new things right now, but...)
>
>For example in the new VM I've added a call to get the macintosh file type and creator. So now you can set and set this information. Although it's platform specific it does add a much needed feature for manipulating macintosh files.
>
>Thoughts?

John:

How about providing access to fonts installed on a Mac system. I'm very tired of New York and Comic as the only available fonts. They may be enough for a development environment, but are sorely lacking when trying to do a standalone application. There are ways to make the code the user finally sees be portable across platforms and differing fonts (see X for example where one can ask for something specific, or for all fonts that match a specification: 12 point, sans serif, italic).

I expect that much of the code could be built in Squeak later once there are VM hooks to the system.

We've been hanging on for some years waiting for that last legal break through which lets us imbed True Type support right in Squeak. Well, it has never happened and it is time to look for an alternative like using the system's own font support. (And that might be as simple as drawing each character in a hidden buffer and making a Squeak font out of it on the fly. If an image always does this at startup then there is never a TT font in Squeak and only the host system ever looks inside the font.)

Keeping my fingers crossed,

Dave
-- 
_______________________________
David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
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