On Mar 20, 2008, at 15:34 , Juan Vuletich wrote:
> Isn't something like http://www.jvuletich.org/NiceFonts.html better  
> for OLPC? (and for most Squeak users, btw...)


No. OLPC eventually needs to support all scripts in the world. Even  
importing all glyphs in Bitstream Vera for regular, bold, italic, bold 
+italic takes a huge amount of memory (the current truetype importer  
imports only the latin1 glyph outlines). And pre-rendering those  
glyphs would take even more space.

Rendering outline fonts on-the-fly is really the only option, and  
that's what the FreeType plugin is really good at, it has been in use  
for some time, so we'd like to deploy it asap.

However, even FreeType doesn't quite cut it, to support proper glyph  
shaping/combining like for Nepali we need something more advanced like  
Pango. The OLPC VM contains the RomePlugin with added Pango support,  
but this is still experimental. I heard Scratch uses Pango too, but I  
have not looked at it yet.

So FreeType is still only an interim solution, but way better than  
what we have now.

An issue that fonts embedded in the image solve nicely is that we  
would like to have identical rendering on all platforms. We have not  
yet decided how to tackle this with external fonts. Ideas appreciated.

- Bert -