Incorporating AccuFonts - remaining problems

Doug Way dway at mailcan.com
Fri Jan 2 04:35:13 UTC 2004


I'm working on incorporating the AccuFonts into 3.7, and I've cleaned 
up some problems, but a couple of problems remain.

Here's what I fixed in this latest version (AccuFonts.4.sar, attached) :

- Some of the default font sizes (text, code, etoys, flaps) got 
changed, I've reset them to the original sizes.
- Removed SystemWindowIcons-nk.cs from the .sar install... it's no 
longer needed.
- I decided to not include the dingbats fonts.  They clutter up the 
'system fonts...' menu by appearing as jibberish, which is annoying.  
Also, I'm not sure we really want such obviously Apple-related dingbats 
in the image such as the Apple logo, compact Mac, etc., even if they 
were "cleanly" generated.
- I added the acknowledgement from the AccuFonts license (the contact 
info for Doug Easterbrook) to the StrikeFont class comment.  The 
license specifies that the acknowledgement appear somewhere, and that 
seemed like as good a place as any.  (Alternatively, it could go in the 
Welcome window, but I don't think it needs to be quite that visible.)

These are the remaining issues (just 2!) :

- Some character widths are much different than the old fonts.  For 
example, the period character width for Accuny10 (the default text 
font) is 6 pixels, whereas it used to be 4 pixels.  This looks pretty 
bad IMHO; 6 pixels looks way too wide for the period character in a 
variable-width font of this size.  Also, the comma, colon and some 
other punctuation marks have different widths.  Is there a StrikeFont 
editor in which this could be easily tweaked?
- Is there an easy way include the .sf2 font files in the update 
stream?  In theory I could encode them into methods, but that's kind of 
a pain.  Should I just wait until 3.7gamma and incorporate them into 
the gamma image and not bother with the update stream?  3.7 goes gamma 
in March.  (Beta in February.)


Anyway, note that the main reason for incorporating these is to allow 
possible cleanup of the Squeak-L license.  The "NewYork" strike font is 
removed, which is the Apple font referred to in the license.  The extra 
bitmap fonts included in the package are a nice bonus, but they're 
nothing spectacular... it would still be good to incorporate some good 
free truetype fonts such as Bitstream Vera into Squeak.  (Which I could 
probably work on next.)

Also note that SystemWindow titlebar font looks different because there 
is no exact equivalent to the old NewYork15 font anymore... but it's 
reasonable.  The text/list font looks pretty much just like the old 
one.  (Actually, Accuny 10 point is equivalent to the old NewYork 12 
point for some reason.)

My latest AccuFonts.4.sar is attached.

- Doug

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