[squeak-dev] fonts, characterscanners and dead primitive 103

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Mon Sep 2 10:39:51 UTC 2013


On 2013-09-02, at 07:24, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

> How have we got into such a mixed and messy state? Did some experiment get partially worked on and forgotten? 

That is pretty much exactly what happened - back in 2005 for the 3.8 release the m17n work done by our Japanese subcommunity was merged in. That work had existed for a couple of years so it was designed to be rather independent of Squeak's old system, rather than being a proper update of it. That is why there is much duplication of machinery. It got to a state that it pretty much worked fine, but no cleanup or simplification was ever attempted.

FT2 is a distinct effort of utilizing the FreeType plugin that was never properly integrated (it's still not in trunk). HostFont had a similar aim but the plugin was only ever implemented on Windows. Scratch's UnicodePlugin is completely separate. And rudimentary Pango support is part of RomePlugin (for odd reasons) but has not been used in Squeak trunk (it is used to render paragraphs of non-Latin scripts in Etoys on Linux).

I agree, it's a mess. Glad you're taking it on :)

- Bert -




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