[squeak-dev] Re: Font rendering

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Tue Apr 28 03:46:15 UTC 2009


I wonder, why we should care bundling TT fonts with squeak?

As well as why we should sacrifice the quality to the abstract 'be
identical on all platforms' idea?

For me, it is strange to even see a phrases like 'be bit identical everywhere'.
Is this the most important thing we should care about when dealing
with font rendering???
Let turn our face to the end users: for font rendering a most
important aspect is quality.
And from user's perspective an overall quality is a balance between
two categories:
 - do things fast (so UI is fast & responsive)
 - render glyphs with a good quality so users can read text on display
without hurting their eyes.


2009/4/27 Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>:
>
> On 27.04.2009, at 17:30, Steve Wart wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Funny. I had installed it only 2 months ago and spent several hours trying
> to get it to work/work well in Cobalt before deciding that Accuny looked
> better than any of the several dozen fonts I scoured through. Don't know why
> I didn't think about that before I posted.
>
> I mentioned because I had been coincidentally looking at GLTT (for another
> project) to render some TT fonts in OpenGL and probably read too much into
> the coincidence.
>
>> 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.
>
> I think this is a problem for a lot of projects and maybe FreeType isn't the
> answer. But it would be nice to have an alternative to the bitmap fonts and
> the TrueType model is very rich (I don't know if it's rich enough for all
> human languages but if there is another model that can live up to that
> standard I'd be interested to find out more). Many decent free fonts are
> available so I don't think external dependencies need to be an issue
> (they're just data), but I don't understand why fonts tend to be a platform
> problem. How is font rendering/lookup dependent on the underlying OS? Can
> that dependency be broken?
>
> By bundling fonts, sure. But trying to convince Linux package maintainers
> that this is a necessity ... that's going to be hard.
>>
>> 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.
>
> It does make sense in some contexts to do everything in Smalltalk. Clearly
> changing the font model is a huge amount of work and there is a long legacy
> of development that depends on fonts working the way they do now. But Squeak
> has for years shipped with its own fonts installed, why do we need to depend
> on the platform for that?
>
> We don't need to, true, but in their current form the plugins cannot render
> fonts embedded in the image.
> - Bert -
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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