On 26.04.2009, at 15:04, Steve Wart wrote:

> Is an external dependency like http://www.freetype.org/ completely  
> out of the question?


Not sure what you mean. There is a FreeType plugin already.

It does work for some applications. But besides huge plugins in  
general being not in the spirit of Smalltalk, one of the particular  
problems of using FreeType is that it depends on external fonts. But  
platform fonts vary largely between systems. That breaks one of the  
core promises of Squeak, platform independence.

Now I know the "re-inventing the wheel" argument. Which is why we made  
a Pango/FreeType rendering plugin for OLPC Etoys, where we need to  
support many more scripts than simple TrueType rendering could do. But  
it already starts to crumble. OLPC defined a platform, so we could  
rely on the fonts we used being installed. But now that Sugar became  
independent of OLPC, there is no control of the platform anymore  
really. Which means it's not guaranteed projects will look the same  
everywhere. We have not yet found a cheap solution to that problem.

- Bert -

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