Andreas,

> BTW, if you're looking at TTFs again, the one thing you might want to 
> consider is to fix glyph color caching. Currently, the worst thing you 
> can do is to change colors. Say, when using syntax highlighting with 
> TTFs. Each time the color changes two bad things happen: First, we 
> recompute the glyph from scratch which is expensive, and second we fill 
> up the glyph cache with the same glyphs in different colors and 
> therefore throwing out previous "good" entries which means more 
> computation when that glyph needs to be displayed. I'll bet that fixing 
> glyph color caching would allow you dramatically reduce the glyph cache 
> size and simply ignore the whole notification on full GC issue.

  Yeah, a new BB combination rule that takes 8-bit (or 4 bit) form for
grayscale, and halftone (or colormap) for color and do the alpha
blending would be convenient.  I think it's been written a few times
by different people, but never gets in the mainstream VM.

-- Yoshiki