Tim Rowledge wrote:
>>>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.

I had to read a couple times to quite catch what you were talking about. 
It's one of those things of different usage patterns. I seldom share 
documents and most of my documents (in which I chose a certain font) 
were for my printer. Portability has never been a big concern for me.

I understand the portability issue which can cause tremendous problems.

It seems that it would be nice to be able to use 'systems fonts' locally 
with warnings to users who try to 'save' or 'export' documents or 
however such would be shared to other Squeak or word processor users.

It would free people up on their own systems to use fonts of choice. And 
I agree a reasonable set of available free fonts would help with 
portability decisions.

Thanks,

Jimmie Houchin