Ned,

You should look very carefully at the Cairo work
(www.cairographics.org).  You can see some samples of
what it can do (dated; it does much more than this now),
by looking on the status page for www.xsvg.org. xsvg hasn't
yet been updated to actually take advantage of where
cairo has gotten to, but it will give you a taste
for the quality of the graphics, which
is the highest quality 2D AA graphics around.

It is (re) implementing basic text stuff as has been done
on Linux in Xft2 (including the flat panel subpixel
decimation work), and doing so in a operating system portable
way (with one requirement of making it possible to do
rendering to memory on a pixel for pixel identical way across
platforms).  So using it I believe should meet Squeak's need
for platform portability.  Note that Cairo is not trying
to do full I18N layout; the text stuff is mostly for simple
applications, expecting that toolkits (like GTK/Pango) do the
full I18N layout problem.

Note that Freetype2 is only part of the entire puzzle; the
additional work has been done in Xft2 (and shortly, Cairo).

I think it is mostly running on Windows as well as Linux now,
though I don't know if the patches have been incorporated into
CVS yet.  It seems to be reaching critical mass as an open
source project, and multiple language bindings are already
under development.  Adding a smalltalk binding should be easy.
                            - Jim


On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 10:20, Ned Konz wrote:
> Vincent Coetzee wrote:
> 
> > I am an old Smalltalker but a relatively unskilled Squeaker. I am 
> > successfully managing to load TT fonts into Squeak, but when I attempt 
> > to use them they are fuzzy and do not inverse or draw properly. Is this 
> > a bug, a peculiarity of the fonts that I am using or do I have to do 
> > something first to make them work properly ? By the way I am trying to 
> > load arial.ttf, verdana.ttf and virtue.ttf.
> 
> The stock TTF support in 3.6/3.7a does not have hinted antialiasing. As 
> a result, the edges tend to be fuzzy (for me, too fuzzy to use as body 
> text below about 16 pt.).
> 
> I am looking into incorporating the recent FreeType/2 work, which will 
> allow us to have much better anti-aliasing.
> 
> However, the highlighting and drawing should work in the existing fonts.
> 
> Can you tell us what version of Squeak you have and how you're seeing 
> inverse and drawing problems?
> 
-- 
Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys at hp.com>
HP Labs, Cambridge Research Laboratory