On Sunday 26 April 2009 7:49:21 pm Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Not sure what you mean. There is a FreeType plugin already.
>
> It does work for some applications. But besides huge plugins in general
> being not in the spirit of Smalltalk, one of the particular problems of
> using FreeType is that it depends on external fonts. But platform fonts
> vary largely between systems. That breaks one of the core promises of
> Squeak, platform independence.
There is another downside - the fonts design does not scale for many non-Roman 
languages. It divides glyphs on language and script basis instead of basic 
graphic shapes. Common sub-shapes are duplicated across fonts. Current 
rendering models support only rectangular bitblts which does not work very 
well for stroke-based compositions found in many Indian and Arabic scripts. 
Calligraphy is restricted to typeface designers.

An intriguing (and challenging) aspect of Squeak is the possibility of 
rendering texts in terms of graphical primitives and adding support for 
changing rendering algorithms on-the-fly. This would allow calligraphy and 
on-the-fly additions of new languages and scripts.

Those who fear the blue plane need not apply ;-).

Subbu