3.7 Full

Ned Konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Fri Mar 26 20:40:53 UTC 2004


On Friday 26 March 2004 11:44 am, Diego Gomez Deck wrote:
> Hi folks...
>
> Some time ago I postulated myself to be the (or one of them) "Full Image
> Maintainer".  I think is time to start to work on this area.
>
> My plan is to start to build the Small-Land image on top of 3.7beta the
> next week. I'll put my best effort to combine both works as much as
> posible to expand the time I can invest on them.
>
> Squeak-Full (it is not Squeak?) has to be the Dynabook.  The original
> ideas, this time with enough hardware.
>
> Here my _first_ proposal of changes and aditions for the 3.7 Full:
>
> - Everything that was part of Squeak before the "modularization" effort
> has to work fine in 3.7 Full (Wonderland, Games, Scamper, Celeste, etc).
> There are a some bug/problems reported about Scamper, Wonderland, IRC,
> etc.  All of them have to be fixed.
>
> - Scamper: The table support has to be integrated.
>
> - IRC -> IRCe.
>
> - Jabber: The Jabber client has to be tested and included in the full
> edition.  Probably we can install a jabber server at squeak.org.
>
> - The default font will be Bitstream giving Squeak a look similar to
> http://swiki.agro.uba.ar/small_land/uploads/58/Squeak1024x768.png

I assume that you mean to use a TTCFont here, as the simple (StrikeFont-like) 
FT2Font does not work outside of the MacRoman character range.

> - The new font-rendering using Freetype/2 has to be part of the image to
> enhance the quality with small fonts. Ned: What about including the
> plugin?

Well, that's going to require a new VM (or at least FT2Plugin). Remember that 
the only place this works right now is on Unix systems.

I think the best way to support this may be to:

* move the support for the new FT2 BitBlt modes out of the BitBltPlugin (which 
I should do, I guess, for backwards compatibility) and into the FT2Plugin

* get someone to build and test the plugin for other platforms (which is 
probably as simple as editing the makefile and configuration bits because 
there are no platform-specific source files).

You can get pre-built Freetype/2 libraries for Windows from the GnuWin32 
project at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/freetype.htm ; I would 
imagine that libfreetype2 could be easily compiled for the Macintosh.

However, it would be better to:

* Unify the FontPlugin, the FT2Plugin, and the new BitBlt modes into a single 
new FontPlugin

Since both Windows and Macintosh platforms provide their own font rendering 
engines, it makes sense to unify the font interface into a new version of the 
FontPlugin, and separate out the platform-specific bits. This would, of 
course, be more work.

Also, I'm not sure that we want to be distributing another library (though the 
Freetype2 license doesn't look too bad; it's very BSD-ish), though we are 
already doing this with the VM regex plugin (which links with libpcre) and 
libmpeg3, and maybe others. However, it's one way to make sure we don't have 
version problems!

* Unify TTCFont, HostFont, StrikeFont, and FT2Font as much as possible, and 
make them use the font plugin if available. This is what Andreas did with 
FontPlugin/HostFont; FT2Font has no dependencies on the plugin (and hence is 
limited to pre-rendered fonts).

> - Ned's Connector: They are a *must*.

Yes, but we want Connectors 2.

> - Genie: The last version from Ned.

Also coming soon.

> - PlotMorph and PieChartMorph: Both with eToy vocabularies.

To do this right we should add my FlexibleVocabularies changes to the base 
system.

How about Monticello, too?


Anyway, it sounds like a lot of work (and probably some more required work on 
the Base image) to get this all updated and working together.

For instance, a recent SAR I put together for Connectors2 to load into a 
virgin 5816 image (for the curious, 
http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/Connectors2Alpha1NoGenie.sar) has the following 
fixes and changes to the base image in it:

SetDefaultSoundService-nk.1.cs
StandardYellowButtonMenus-nk.1.mcz
UsableSiblingInstanceFix-nk.2.cs
SimpleButtonWhilePressedFix-nk.6.cs
BlankMenuIconsPref-nk.6.cs
ImageAndSketchFixes-nk.2.cs
IsLineMorphFix-nk.1.cs
GenieStubs-nk.2.mcz
FlexibleVocabularies-nk.4.mcz
CustomEvents-nk.13.mcz

Some of these may have already made it into the update stream; others haven't.

The ImageAndSketchFixes hasn't even been posted yet, I think.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE



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