I've been reading the commentary about TT font licensing issues with some
interest, but the problem has all of a sudden become concrete for us.  As
the folks at Monty Python have been wont to say, we have been presented with
a poser.

Basically, we have routines in our system that make it easy to create
textures for 3D objects from arbitrary text and font selections. Yeah, we
didn't think it was that big a deal either.....

But here's a bit of code --
xTextureImage _ V3Image text: 'Market Cap'
				font: 'Courier New' weight: 500 height: 32
				italic:  false isUline: false
				fColor: (SFVec3f new color:(Color black))
				bColor: (SFVec3f new color:(Color green)).

We give back a handle to an image we maintain, and provide a means for
converting this to a Form.

So did a little experiment and got a little text window going where each and
every letter was rendered via this process (great for ransom note
typography, randomly select from set of available fonts on each char) and
performance seemed to be ok.

So, QUESTION -
	If Squeak started using logic to get the platforms local typeface system to
render individual letters, and this low level 'give me an H in Merovingian
at 32 point italicized' was a nice snappy routine,  is it reasonable to
assume that Squeak could survive the introduction of this overhead and get
access to the underlying font system ?  Basically, you could look at this as
effectively throwing away the internal glyphs and just doing everything on
demand.  Of course, caching is often a good thing.

IFF So,
	Doesn't the implicit typeface usage license 'bind' to the host OS, i.e. if
you didn't swipe the face itself, and you have a legal copy of an OS that
has a right to use the font system, then you have a right to use those fonts
on the machine?   It seems to us that if a program uses the native typeface
API, then all is cool, i.e.  OS API calling applications do not have this
problem whereas Squeak does cause it's not 'doing the right thing'.

So, if there's not much of a penalty by making Squeak (optionally!!!!)
source it's individual glyphs on a demand basis from the native OS API's,
doesnt that make everything cool ?


Regards
Mark/Vibrant3D