Ok, I haven't followed this thread that much BUT... following the ideas
of Squeak wouldn't it be better and cleaner with a freetype2-plugin? It
would look the same on all platforms.

It looks to me (having spent 2 minutes on their website) that it is
extremely portable (ANSI-C without external dependencies), has a
BSD-like license AND (with version 2) is free of patents:

http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/index.html#requirements

...this is an excerpt of that page:
-------------
Requirements

FreeType 2 is written in industry-standard ANSI C and should compile
easily with any compliant C compiler. We've even taken great care to
eliminate all warnings when compiling with popular compilers like gcc,
Visual C++ and Borland C++.

Apart from a standard ANSI C library, FreeType 2 doesn't have any
external dependencies and can be compiled and installed on its own on
any kind of system.

Patents issues

Some small aspects of the TrueType specification being covered by
several patents owned by Apple Computer, it is generally not possible to
render TrueType glyphs exactly as they should without infringing on
Apple's IP rights (without a license).

This explains that we've taken some special measures to deal with this
problem:

    * First of all, a default build of the FreeType 2 sources will not
use any of the patented techniques to render TrueType glyphs. You'll
thus be safe to use it freely in all kinds of projects.

      Unfortunately, this freedom comes at the price of sometimes
less-than-ideal glyph quality, depending on the font design, and most
surely different glyph metrics for a given font.
    * In the case where you want the best TrueType glyph quality (for
example if you're in a country where the patent doesn't apply, or if you
have a patent from Apple), you'll simply need to toggle a simple
configuration macro before compiling and installing the library, and
voila !!

PS. <CSOTD>
"Newbie tip: Simple string pattern matching! Do print it on each line,
see method
String>>match: for more details."

'abc*' match: 'abcdef'
'ab#de#' match: 'abcdef'
'*def' match: 'abcdef'

</CSOTD> DS