Tim,

> > 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.

The short answer is that there's a difference between the standard fonts
shipped with Squeak and those that users of Squeak may like to use. When I
use Verdana (which I do all the time) I'm only pitying those people who
don't have it ;-) And fortunately, I _could_ take the imported StrikeFont
and ship it with the text if I would care deeply enough!

The long answer(s) can be found here: 
	http://www.google.com/search?q=panose
	http://www.google.com/search?q=font+embedding

> 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 :-)

Sure thing. But VW never had a set of "builtin" fonts, never had a way of
dealing with fonts for itself, which required people to find "some ways" of
getting true cross-platform appearance. Isn't it nice to have control over
your destiny ;-) Being able to choose a bunch of fonts that you _know_ will
work across all platforms, being able to import a set of fonts (either as
TTFs or as Strikes) that you _know_ will be rendered exactly the same no
matter where you're at is what makes all the difference in this regard. Even
today we got plenty of fonts that people could ship with Squeak apps
(including bitmap fonts such as Accu and TTFs such as Vera).

Cheers,
  - Andreas