The Weekly Juan #10: "Cheap, High Quality Fonts in Squeak"

Juan Vuletich juan at jvuletich.org
Sun Apr 29 11:22:24 UTC 2007


I agree with all you say. And you, Andy or anybody is welcome to try 
that approach. But I'm not doing it, because I'm making my Morphic 3.0 
image (where I'm focusing all my energy) as small as possible, and I 
won't have Freetype. At lease not now.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

tim Rowledge escribió:
>
> On 28-Apr-07, at 6:33 PM, Juan Vuletich wrote:
>
>> I agree with the kerning issue. It is one of the disadvantages I 
>> talked about in my page.
>>
>> But, an image that already has FreeType (I guess you're talking about 
>> it), what's the need for something like what I did?
>
> As you say, it might seem like there is little point in using the 
> bitmaps if one has the plugin. However, not all machines are fast 
> enough to render the characters 'live'. There is certainly a useful 
> libration point of functionality where the plugin is used to initially 
> render character glyphs and then the cached glyph is used for actual 
> rendering. The caching could be on the basis of all characters in a 
> font at once, or just the characters used, or predictive caching based 
> on character frequency in the relevant language.
>
> An example of this approach is RISC OS, where they generated cached 
> character glyphs in 1/2 sub-pixel antialised form at need as a way of 
> getting very high quality screen and printer fonts as far back as 
> 1987. On a machine with 1Mb ram and 4mips! If this isn't a plausible 
> way of getting decent fonts on more recent but non-leading-edge 
> machines then I'd be very surprised.
>
>> If you really care about kerning and other issues (like in Sophie), 
>> the proper solution is modeling the fonts and rendering them. My 
>> solution is for more modest needs, like a programmer that wants to 
>> avoid extra complexity and is happy with nice looking code.
>
> Indeed - and my suggestion would offer you a relatively easy way of 
> improving that nice facility with a lot less manual hacking. You could 
> also make use of any font on the users machine instead of just the 
> ones that you have spent the time processing, which would surely 
> reduce the wear and tear on your fingertips :-)
>
> tim
> -- 
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
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