Adding Accufonts to the update stream (was Re: LicencesQuestion : Squeak-L Art 6.)

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Tue Feb 25 00:05:27 UTC 2003


On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 03:51  PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Daniel,
>
>> That, IIUC, means both that no VM changes is needed, and that no
>> incompatibility is caused, in which case, it's merely a matter of
>> creating another font package to put SM, and either should be
>> installable after the other.
>
> Well, actually, that's not _quite_ true. Changing the default character
> encoding *does* require VM support. And, doing so *will* introduce a  
> certain
> amount of incompatibility. The point I was making is that "our daily  
> use of
> fonts" is not necessarily affected (e.g., changing the default  
> encoding does
> not necessarily affect whether you can use any of the fonts currently  
> in
> Squeak).

I was wondering about that, right now characters come whizzing up from  
the VM event handler  get
manipulated into a string, then back down to the file support where we  
assume they are macroman
and get converted back to what makes the file system happy. Changing  
where this mapping happens
in Smalltalk (if it does) doesn't fix issue with arbitrary strings in  
the image that are perhaps valid
macroman file names, this is one place there is an issue, not sure  
about others, clipboard support I'd guess.

As an example I'll point out somewhere I got bit many years ago, when  
VW moved to unicode.
In this app we stored logonid for oracle in what we thought was  
strings. However upon a migration
to NT it turned out that VW now extruded the characters as unicode  
because the file system support unicode by default,
and when we present the characters to the primitive interface as  
unicode, where before they were ascii, then
interesting bad things happened. It took a while to figure out because  
all the tools cheerfully did the unicode
translation required. Only in the low level debugger could we see the  
data wasn't right.

  --
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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