Hi Michael,

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Rueger" <m.rueger at acm.org>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 8:15 AM
Subject: Re: [ANN] FreeType+Subpixel anti-aliasing Update


> Andrew Tween wrote:
> > An updated vm+plugins+image containing my latest work in getting the
FreeType
> > font support from the Sophie project into 3.9 can be obtained from here...
>
> Nice!!!
> What changes did you make to the plugin? We should try to make sure to
> stay in sync to avoid duplicate or conflicting changes.

The zip contains all the source, but 26Mb is a lot to download just to see that
!.
So, I have put a zip containing just the source, no image/changes/executables,
here,...

http://www.zen61439.zen.co.uk/Squeak3.9g-7054_FreeType_sourceOnly.zip

I have tried to keep the plugin code compatible. So, for example, I do not clear
the FT2Face fields when releasing it, but rather than modifying the exisitng
primitive, I have added a new one to do a release without clearing. There may be
some duplication of code, but that can be tidied later. Then there is a bunch of
entirely new primitives, for emboldening, allocating/freeing memory for the
in-memory faces, emboldening, transform/translate outlines, etc.

FT2Handle, and subclasses, have diverged slightly. I changed the
validate/release logic. And there is new stuff.

I also renamed things that refererred to Freetype to refer to FreeType (capital
T), but that is cosmetic. So, for example, FreetypeFontFace is now
FreeTypeFontFace.

FreeTypeFont is significantly different.

I agree that staying in sync is important.
For the plugin, you should be able to easily incorporate my changes.
For the rest, it is probably best if you take any code that is useful to you,
and I will do the same with the latest Sophie code. Having done that, we can
compare to see what the remaining differences are.

>
> > Fonts can be stored in the image as ByteArrays, and used by the FreeType
plugin,
> > without requiring the font file to exist, or be re-created, on disk.
>
> Sweet! Exactly what we urgently need for Sophie so we can embed fonts
> without copyright issues.

Could you expand on what you mean by "copyright issues"?
I embed the entire file contents, which probably counts as distribution, and so
copyright/license still applies. Perhaps you were thinking of a different way of
embedding?

>
> > Font files must be placed in the ./fonts folder before installing - this
will be
> > improved later.
>
> At least in the Sophie font manager we can do this already. But then we
> keep the fonts separate from the Squeak font system.

I'll take a look.

Cheers,
Andy

>
> > -------
> > TODO:
> >
> > Kerning.
>
> In the latest Sophie stuff we added kerning and tracking access.
>
> > Better font substitution for missing font files (i.e. use a sans serif
strike
> > font in place of a missing sans serif ttf font).
>
> That is a tricky business. Ask VW users how that can fail horribly, even
> with best intentions.
>
> Great work!
>
> Michael
>
>
>