zeppy@australia.edu wrote:

Hi! I've noticed that there aren't that many fonts available in Squeak.

Yes, our image contains Atlanta in two sizes, NewYork in four sizes, Comic Bold in five sizes andComic Plain in four sizes. As an add-on we have the really beautiful AccuFonts on all platforms. On window platforms we have more: Andreas Raab wrote a plugin that allows us to create bitmapped fonts from TrueType fonts. Recently, Yoshiki Ohshima added code that does not need a platform specific plugin to render glyphs from a TT-Font. His code works on all platforms that are equipped with TrueType-fonts, and it gives nice results.

The Squeak character display machinery does not support kerning. Therefore the use of decorative TT-fonts that require kerning does not always give the best results.

Like Smalltlak-80, Squeak uses bitmapped fonts. (an instance of class StrikeFont contains the bitmaps for all glyphs of a font in one size). The more sophisticated outline fonts were never completely brought to Squeak. We can read TTF-files and we can create unhinted glyphs, but we never added the code to execute glyph hints. Apple owns three patents on glyph hinting, so we would certainly need a licence from Apple to implement their patented algorithms in Squeak. (see www.freetype.org for details about OpenType fonts, glyph hinting and the Apple patents. The site gives even the numbers of said patents - for those who want to know all details). Hints are short programs that are written for a virtual machine that has special instructions to grid-fit glyph outlines at small sizes.(hey, Smalltalk had a virtual machine years before TrueType fonts came into use!) For some time, the Squeak developers were associated with Apple, but regrettably that company never donated glyph hinting technology to Squeak. :-(

The code from Yoshiki is platform independent and it is pure Squeak which means that you can easily modify it to extract glyphs for various scripts (like greek or cyrillic) from TT-fonts that support these scripts.

The plugin from Andreas is a good solution for Windows: It calls code that you licenced together with Windows. That code uses glyph hints and it rasterizes hinted TT-Fonts in the same quality that you know from other programs that use the same code. The use of licenced Windows software avoids licence problems but it comes at a price: It works only on Windows.

I would have thought with object technology that it wouldn't be a problem to have more.

Honestly spoken, I do not see that fonts are the best field to demonstrate the power of object technology. Well, the plugin from Andreas is a nice example of what can be done for one dedicated platform. (This remark assumes that you agree that DLLs are object technology.)

Why isn't there and how involved is this topic.

Most of us think that complete platform-independent support for TrueType or OpenType outline fonts is obstacled by licence problems. We can of course draw our own bitmapped fonts but that is time-consuming work! The page www.freetype.org gives some answers to the last question: How involved is this topic.

Greetings, Boris