[squeak-dev] The Trunk: TrueType-mt.52.mcz

Tobias Pape Das.Linux at gmx.de
Tue Aug 20 17:26:31 UTC 2019


Hi
> On 20.08.2019, at 19:00, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 2019-08-20, at 9:56 AM, Tobias Pape <Das.Linux at gmx.de> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On 20.08.2019, at 18:54, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 2019-08-20, at 6:35 AM, commits at source.squeak.org wrote:
>>>> Squeak's management of fonts and text styles and text-font changes and text-font references is kind of ugly. :-)
>>> 
>>> That is very much an understatement. I wish we could do better
>> 
>> If I just had some time…
> 
> Yeah, I hear you.
> 
> One simple approach you could try playing with is the code I did for NuScratch. That (and it was very Raspberry Pi focussed, so may be a problem elsewhere)used Cairo/Pango plugins to render strings to a form and then copied the form to the display. Now it's important to remember that this was almost entirely for small chunks of text, rarely more than a few words, but even on an original Pi it was perfectly good performance. You'd find the code in the NuScratch package on squeaksource (in SM too) and the unicode plugin and maybe the scratch plugin.

I've seen the NuScratch way, I think we even chatted about it.

Pain is: Pango/Cairo is not thaaaat easy to do platform-independently.

We also had some students who did something like that. maybe we can resurrect that code…

I think having at least HarfBuzz and Freetype for lowlevel stuff would be beneficial
(it's what Pango uses, too, after all). And I think HarfBuzz is imperative if we 
ever what to truly support anything beyond latin.

Best regards
	-Tobias 



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