[Squeakfoundation]re: TrueType font support and 3.6

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sat Jun 21 09:33:12 CEST 2003


Just a note about performance.
	Alex went in roumania to teach Smalltalk and he tried to use squeak 
but could not
	with a normal image. It took then a 2.8 shrunk image.
	So performance is still important.

Stef

On Saturday, June 21, 2003, at 04:02 AM, Tim Rowledge wrote:

> Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:
>
>> Andreas Raab wrote:
>>
>>> Completely agree.
>>>
>>> BTW, Tim, does *installing* or *using* the TT fonts slow your system 
>>> down?
> It's the using, which as you say isn't totally unexpected. Oddly enough
> it seems fine in menus _after_ the first time the menu is popped up
> (presumably the initial rendering) but in text panes it's _really_ 
> slow.
> As Craig says, it's ok on his machine (I've seen it) but my machine is
> about one third the performance overall and when on the margin a factor
> of three can seem enormous. Typing in a morph is already excruciating
> even with boring strikefonts.
>
> Seeing things like this on a slow machine can be very useful and
> informative. Stuff that appears just fine on a multi-GHz box can
> actually be awful code simply 'getting away with murder' and then you
> see the real effect on a slower machine... It's the old scaling problem
> and benchmarks and profiling story.
>
> So an obvious question has to be what is the more expensive rendering
> and does it really have to be used - or could a simpler one be a
> preference at the expense of a little quality? Or can the expensive one
> be sped up with more plugin code?
>
>>
>> Right.  Assuming it's using (not just installing) the TT fonts that
>> slows things down on slower systems, we could incorporate the TT fonts
>> changes, but not actually change any of the default fonts to be TT 
>> fonts
>> for now.  (Maybe change a default font to be a TT font sometime in 3.7
>> if it's working really well.)
> I'd certainly agree with that. The fonts look too good to not be
> available for most people. I think to be actually useful we need to put
> together some better thought out textstyles than typically get 
> generated
> by 'load a TTF as textstyle' though. And a theme that incorporates them
> in one go would be helpful, as would another than doesn't incorporate
> them. Make it truly easy to use and people will use it.
>
> tim
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> Useful random insult:- A mental midget with the IQ of a fencepost.  -- 
> Tom Waits
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