<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On 26.04.2009, at 15:04, Steve Wart wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">Is an external dependency like <a href="http://www.freetype.org/">http://www.freetype.org/</a> completely out of the question?<br></blockquote></div><div><br></div>Not sure what you mean. There is a FreeType plugin already.<br><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; ">- Bert -</span></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><br></font></div></body></html>