>   Arjen,
>
>> Some time ago I wrote a plugin to talk to the freetype 2 library. I've
>> been playing with it on and off (I like to have nice fonts in
>> squeak but I don't like most font issues like advance etc.). As
>> Bitstream has published the Vera font family I decided to clean up
>> and publish my effort, it's available at
>> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3192. The package comes with prebuild
>> library's for linux (3.4-devel1 and 3.5-devel1 both work on my system)
>> and one ttf font for testing.
>
>   The primitive that uses a 8bit form as alpha is something I want to
> have.  Thanks.  I'm not sure we want to have yet another scanning
> primitive, but of course, you can always fall back to the backup code.
>
The scanning primitive was needed  to support real advances and not the
width of a glyph, I think this way the text looks much better. Maybe we
can do away with the scanning primitive all together I don't know if this
is fast enough...

>> Low-lights;
>> * No bold or italics support
>
>   This can be done in Squeak-level code,
I know, but this didn't look very good and therefor I moved the font to a
subclass of abstarctfont and not strikefont. I would like to use different
font files for bold and italic (if supported by the font). This is not
very hard.

>
>> * No real knowledge of font-familys
>
>   once you have a way to get this info.
Yes we have ways to do this but I meant high level support (like reading a
couple of font directories and extracting font family info, composing one
font out of different true type files that can handle such thing as bold
italic etc).

>> * Not Unicode
>
>   What do you mean by this?
The primitives go only to 256 characters as well as the font reading and
converting it would'nt be too hard to support more chars but this would
depend on fall-back code.


>   Thank you for sharing the good work!
Thx

Arjen

PS I found two embarasing bugs this week-end (one in a primitive and one
in  FT2Font>>widthOf:) so I'll be posting a new version. For now don't use
chars > 128 (this is a signed/unsigned C bug) .