[squeak-dev] Re: Font rendering

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Mon Apr 27 15:45:36 UTC 2009


On 27.04.2009, at 17:30, Steve Wart wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de 
> > wrote:
> On 26.04.2009, at 15:04, Steve Wart wrote:
>> Is an external dependency like http://www.freetype.org/ completely  
>> out of the question?
>
> Not sure what you mean. There is a FreeType plugin already.
>
> Funny. I had installed it only 2 months ago and spent several hours  
> trying to get it to work/work well in Cobalt before deciding that  
> Accuny looked better than any of the several dozen fonts I scoured  
> through. Don't know why I didn't think about that before I posted.
>
> I mentioned because I had been coincidentally looking at GLTT (for  
> another project) to render some TT fonts in OpenGL and probably read  
> too much into the coincidence.
>
> 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.
>
> I think this is a problem for a lot of projects and maybe FreeType  
> isn't the answer. But it would be nice to have an alternative to the  
> bitmap fonts and the TrueType model is very rich (I don't know if  
> it's rich enough for all human languages but if there is another  
> model that can live up to that standard I'd be interested to find  
> out more). Many decent free fonts are available so I don't think  
> external dependencies need to be an issue (they're just data), but I  
> don't understand why fonts tend to be a platform problem. How is  
> font rendering/lookup dependent on the underlying OS? Can that  
> dependency be broken?

By bundling fonts, sure. But trying to convince Linux package  
maintainers that this is a necessity ... that's going to be hard.

> Now I know the "re-inventing the wheel" argument. Which is why we  
> made a Pango/FreeType rendering plugin for OLPC Etoys, where we need  
> to support many more scripts than simple TrueType rendering could  
> do. But it already starts to crumble. OLPC defined a platform, so we  
> could rely on the fonts we used being installed. But now that Sugar  
> became independent of OLPC, there is no control of the platform  
> anymore really. Which means it's not guaranteed projects will look  
> the same everywhere. We have not yet found a cheap solution to that  
> problem.
>
> It does make sense in some contexts to do everything in Smalltalk.  
> Clearly changing the font model is a huge amount of work and there  
> is a long legacy of development that depends on fonts working the  
> way they do now. But Squeak has for years shipped with its own fonts  
> installed, why do we need to depend on the platform for that?


We don't need to, true, but in their current form the plugins cannot  
render fonts embedded in the image.

- Bert -


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