Convincing a harvester (was on SqF list)

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Tue May 6 22:51:22 UTC 2003


> > Squeak is the most important and promising multimedia environment. We
> > *really* need high quality font support in the core-image.
> 
> I whole-heartedly agree. I would love the ability to use a systems 
> available fonts.
I'd love to see access to good fonts as well but there is that nasty
phrase above that creeps up and whacks us - 'systems available fonts'.
There's this problem that font names cause by being idiosyncratic in a
lot of cases. What are you going to do if you import some code that asks
for Bodoni-bold-double-light-italic-14-+1leading and you
a) don't have any bodoni and wouldn't know it from a skating rink
ice-cleaner anyway
b) your machine doesn't name fonts that way either. Mine would use a
path like !fonts.Bodoni.Bold.Italic  and the font file would deal with
the size and leading details.

Users of VisualWorks on unix machines with a couple of thousand
installed fonts can probably provide plenty of horror stories about the
problems that arise :-)

Certainly, let's put the mechanism in the typical image and perhaps we
can find a portable way to provide a modest set of actual fonts but be
aware that using _your_ platforms fonts may be a little more tricky.

tim 
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
My mail reader can beat up your mail reader.



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