[squeak-dev] Statistics on merging Cuis with 3.10 on Morph hierarchy

> On Monday 20 April 2009 9:17:38 pm Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> Linux and Windows users are accustomed to heavily hinted font
>> rendering, looking overly "crisp" because lines are snapped to the
>> screen pixel grid. The result has little resemblance to the true
>> character shape as it would appear when printed on paper, but it's
>> what they are used to. In contrast, Apple's and Adobe's font rendering
>> is much more truthful to the paper appearance, but looks "blurry" to
>> Windows and Linux users
> Squeak's screen and its contents are meant to be consumed on bitmap monitors
> and rarely printed on paper, so why should the fonts be optimized for paper
> rendering and not display monitors?
>
> Confused .. Subbu

>
> On 27.04.2009, at 17:30, Steve Wart wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]>
> 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 -
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