[squeak-dev] [Newbies] What font do you use in macOS ?

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Sat Dec 7 19:19:06 UTC 2019



> On 2019-12-07, at 8:12 AM, Tobias Pape <Das.Linux at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 07.12.2019, at 14:36, Thiede, Christoph <Christoph.Thiede at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de> wrote:
>> 
>> It would be great if the Trunk image would contain more sizes of this font by default, perhaps 1 to: 72 by: 1
>> ...
> 
> If only "that" wouldn't take up so much money

I suspect you intended to type 'memory' here, but perhaps you were indeed concerned about licensing; some fonts are certainly very license/cost encumbered.
> 
>> 
>> Or could you maybe provide a dense set of generated PNGs in the release section of your repo? For all the people who don't have a mac :-)
> 
> Err. I am unsure whether the licenses permit that and I have no time to check.

There are a good number of free outline fonts available. I mentioned one source a week or three ago - fonts.google.com

Probably the best trick would be to make it easier to locate/load/process/use such fonts in normal usage. We can read TTF files pretty well (not sure if we handle all the skeleton hinting etc) and produce font glyphs at specific sizes. Caching them efficiently shouldn't be beyond the skills of such an impressive bunch of programmers. We could save the glyph data out as image segments in much the same way that we cache local MC files. Waaaaaay back in the last millennium we (as in 'exobox') did that and loading the glyphs for maybe 50 fonts/sizes from image segments took a small fraction of a second on the cheapest x86 machines of the era. Even waaaaay-er (is that word? It is now) back in time Acorn did a related thing for high quality fonts for RISC OS; render the glyphs as needed on a per-character basis, and render them separately for sub-pixle positioning. We could easily manage quarter-pixel positioning that way - remember, the Acorn machines had at max 4mb ram. we have code in the image already to do sub-pixle rendering, or at least the preferences to select it!


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Artificial Intelligence:  Making computers behave like they do in the movies.




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