[Squeakfoundation]re: TrueType font support and 3.6

[Tim Rowledge]

Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:

> Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> >Completely agree. 
> >
> >BTW, Tim, does *installing* or *using* the TT fonts slow your system down?
It's the using, which as you say isn't totally unexpected. Oddly enough
it seems fine in menus _after_ the first time the menu is popped up
(presumably the initial rendering) but in text panes it's _really_ slow.
As Craig says, it's ok on his machine (I've seen it) but my machine is
about one third the performance overall and when on the margin a factor
of three can seem enormous. Typing in a morph is already excruciating
even with boring strikefonts.

Seeing things like this on a slow machine can be very useful and
informative. Stuff that appears just fine on a multi-GHz box can
actually be awful code simply 'getting away with murder' and then you
see the real effect on a slower machine... It's the old scaling problem
and benchmarks and profiling story.

So an obvious question has to be what is the more expensive rendering
and does it really have to be used - or could a simpler one be a
preference at the expense of a little quality? Or can the expensive one
be sped up with more plugin code?

> 
> Right.  Assuming it's using (not just installing) the TT fonts that 
> slows things down on slower systems, we could incorporate the TT fonts 
> changes, but not actually change any of the default fonts to be TT fonts 
> for now.  (Maybe change a default font to be a TT font sometime in 3.7 
> if it's working really well.)
I'd certainly agree with that. The fonts look too good to not be
available for most people. I think to be actually useful we need to put
together some better thought out textstyles than typically get generated
by 'load a TTF as textstyle' though. And a theme that incorporates them
in one go would be helpful, as would another than doesn't incorporate
them. Make it truly easy to use and people will use it.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- A mental midget with the IQ of a fencepost.  -- Tom Waits