[Squeakfoundation]Visibility in the open source community

[Andreas Raab]

> >Regarding fonts, I am thinking that it would make Squeak 
> > more desirable if it could use existing font libraries for 
> > the Mac and PC.
> >
> Both. Squeak must come with a platform-independent set of 
> fonts, in order to protect the write-once, run exactly the
> same everywhere feature. So something must be in the image.

I agree. However, considering all the rants about the copyright issues
and considering that it appears to be impossible to protect _bitmap_
renderings of TrueType fonts (as opposed to the possibility that someone
- e.g. Apple - might care about some 'original bitmap fonts') it might
be worthwhile to replace the fonts in the image with bitmap
representations of well-known TTFs (such as Arial, Times New, Verdana,
WingDings etc). I've posted code to do exactly this (e.g., interfacing
to Windows in order to create bitmaps from TTFs) and it does work rather
nicely. So well, in fact, that I'm running various images without any
Apple fonts at all and the replacements actually look a lot better, and
can - given that you have the native TTF - even be scaled to arbitrary
sizes.

Cheers,
  - Andreas