why not source typeface glyphs on demand from the host os (optionally!)

David N. Smith (IBM) dnsmith at watson.ibm.com
Thu Feb 14 23:10:10 UTC 2002


MRK:

Yeah, yeah,  yeah,  yeah,  yeah,  yeah,  yeah,  yeah,  yeah,  yeah,  yeah, YEAH!

AND one could do this so it's platform independent. X/Motif has an ugly hack that works well, and I'm sure we could find a cleaner one.

I'm about to have to admit that Squeak won't work for a project since the font support is so lousie. Since we just spent months selling Squeak as a rich tool, especially in UI, we're about to eat our own words.

I'd be happy to talk more off line if we could get a small group interested in this.

Dave


At 15:20 -0500 2/14/02, Mark Mullin wrote:
>I've been reading the commentary about TT font licensing issues with some
>interest, but the problem has all of a sudden become concrete for us.  As
>the folks at Monty Python have been wont to say, we have been presented with
>a poser.
>
>Basically, we have routines in our system that make it easy to create
>textures for 3D objects from arbitrary text and font selections. Yeah, we
>didn't think it was that big a deal either.....
>
>But here's a bit of code --
>xTextureImage _ V3Image text: 'Market Cap'
>				font: 'Courier New' weight: 500 height: 32
>				italic:  false isUline: false
>				fColor: (SFVec3f new color:(Color black))
>				bColor: (SFVec3f new color:(Color green)).
>
>We give back a handle to an image we maintain, and provide a means for
>converting this to a Form.
>
>So did a little experiment and got a little text window going where each and
>every letter was rendered via this process (great for ransom note
>typography, randomly select from set of available fonts on each char) and
>performance seemed to be ok.
>
>So, QUESTION -
>	If Squeak started using logic to get the platforms local typeface system to
>render individual letters, and this low level 'give me an H in Merovingian
>at 32 point italicized' was a nice snappy routine,  is it reasonable to
>assume that Squeak could survive the introduction of this overhead and get
>access to the underlying font system ?  Basically, you could look at this as
>effectively throwing away the internal glyphs and just doing everything on
>demand.  Of course, caching is often a good thing.
>
>IFF So,
>	Doesn't the implicit typeface usage license 'bind' to the host OS, i.e. if
>you didn't swipe the face itself, and you have a legal copy of an OS that
>has a right to use the font system, then you have a right to use those fonts
>on the machine?   It seems to us that if a program uses the native typeface
>API, then all is cool, i.e.  OS API calling applications do not have this
>problem whereas Squeak does cause it's not 'doing the right thing'.
>
>So, if there's not much of a penalty by making Squeak (optionally!!!!)
>source it's individual glyphs on a demand basis from the native OS API's,
>doesnt that make everything cool ?
>
>
>Regards
>Mark/Vibrant3D


-- 
_______________________________
David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
dnsmith at watson.ibm.com



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