Hi John,
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John M McIntosh" <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 9:54 PM
Subject: Re: [ANN] FreeType Plus release


> In all of this I'm not sure if people noticed another important
> change we made in Sophie.
>
> That was changing emphasis from a magic number to an object.

Yes, I noticed that. And I remember you mentioning it to me in the past.
It is a good idea.
I have stuck with the existing magic number scheme mainly because the thought of
identifying, and changing, all the existing places where these magic numbers are
used seemed quite daunting.

>
> Then you could ask
>
> isBold
> ^self emphasis includesEmphasis: SophieFontEmphasisEncoder bold
>
>
> The reason for this was to handle things like 'Light' ,Condensed,
> Medium, Demibold, or ExtraBold
> Also to get rid of magic numbers, which btw were not say in a 3.8
> image actually correctly handled in *all*
> the places where code was looking for magic emphasis numbering.

This is good for font substitution and document portability.
Currently, I simply treat these 'unusual' weights as being distinct font
families, and don't do anything clever about matching missing fonts to the best
available substitute.

(On a similar theme, there was a very interesting article mentioned on a
FreeType newsgroup about how font names, families, and groupings are determined
on Windows. I don't know if you have come across it before, but you might find
it interesting...
 http://blogs.msdn.com/text/archive/2007/04/23/wpf-font-selection-model.aspx
)

Cheers,
Andy