[ENH] Accufonts changeset candidate for 3.7alpha

John Pfersich jp1660 at att.net
Wed Jan 28 06:06:27 UTC 2004


I vote a great big YES on this inclusion. the fonts look great and and
there are more faces than with the set currently in Squeak.  And
Microsoft's withdrawn the free distribution of Comic Sans besides.

I have had problems with the  BitStream Vera TrueType fonts, the font menu
is totally fouled up for those fonts and they don't appear to display
correctly.

Doug Way wrote:
>With the help of a bit of handy code from Ned, I've converted the
>Accufonts.sar file on SqueakMap with all of its bundled .sf2 font files
>into a single changeset which could be added to the update stream. The
>entire changeset is just over 100K, not too bad, although a little too
>large to post to this list, so I put it here:
>
>http://www.mindspring.com/~dway/smalltalk/InstallAccuFonts.8.cs.gz
>
>This is the candidate for inclusion in the 3.7alpha update stream. Note
>that the main point of the changeset is to remove the original Apple
>fonts (NewYork) from the image, so that the font clause in Squeak-L
>becomes irrelevant, allowing the possibility of making progress with
>sublicensing (or even re-licensing) Squeak. The replacement fonts look
>very similar so there shouldn't be much that's noticably changed. As a
>bonus, several extra bitmap fonts are thrown in.
>
>This also removes the ComicPlain/Bold bitmap fonts, which are not free
>font and were removed so that potential business users of Squeak have a
>"clean" image to work from font-wise. On the other hand, apparently
>there is some legal precedent recently that bitmap fonts are not
>copyrightable, so this may or may not really be an issue.  Anyway,
>"Accujen" is a reasonable looking sans-serif replacement for the Comic
>fonts.
>
>This changeset does not remove the ComicSansMS TrueType font (yet),
>which probably should be removed, because outline fonts definitely are
>copyrightable, and this is not a free font either as far as I know.
>However, I was going to wait and possibly remove this one as part of
>incorporating the BitStream Vera TrueType fonts, so we have a bunch of
>replacement TT fonts before getting rid of this one.
>
>The "Atlanta" bitmap font, which someone donated to Squeak awhile back,
>remains.
>
>The Accufonts come with their own (very simple) license, included in the
>changeset preamble. This seems fine, fonts are a very different entity
>from source code, and it is not uncommon for software to provide a
>separate license for included fonts.
>
>There are still a couple of smallish issues with these fonts, but I
>wanted to get these in soon so that people can try them out, and we can
>fix/tweak things based on feedback from that. The problems I know of
>are:  The character widths for some punctuation characters could use
>some adjusting... e.g. the Accuny period character is quite wide and
>looks funny IMHO. Also, some fonts such as Accuny09 and Accuny10 have
>the same size of 12, which can cause problems for some tools, such as
>Boris Gaertner's useful FontEditor tool.
>
>One odd last thing... I notice that the "Smalltalk garbageCollect" at
>the end of the postscript does not remove the old fonts from "StrikeFont
>allInstances", but doing a manual garbageCollect after filing in the
>changeset does. Maybe the ChangeSet object is somehow holding onto the
>fonts up 'til then, or something. No biggie I guess, we'll make sure
>garbage is collected sometime before 3.7 goes final. ;-)
>
>- Doug






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