One cannot claim to have the worlds greatest multimedia content builder,
then admit to having only three > fonts with fixed sizes.
Besides, looking ahead, shouldn't Structure Audio and MPEG4 (DivX ?) deserve attentions too ?
This isn't a complaint though. Just day dreaming ;-)
Cheers,
PhiHo
----- Original Message ----- From: "David N. Smith (IBM)" dnsmith@watson.ibm.com To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2001 4:02 PM Subject: Font Support
All:
The single most troubling problem in Squeak is the lack of real font
support. I've just finished a large, packaged program and had to make do with NewYork, and images of large characters in a font cut from Illustrator and pasted into Graphic Converter, then twiddled, and then saved as GIFs, in three large sizes, for about 30 characters each, then read into the program and then laid out by code I wrote. (There are other solutions; I disliked this one the least.)
With real font support I could address the font directly.
I know one issue is portability and that strike fonts move readily between
platforms.
Maybe there should be some way to:
- Query the current platform for fonts with certain characteristics.
(Answer all serif, answer all monospace, answer all bold Courier, etc. X-Windows has a mechanism for doing such searches that might be useful to look at.)
- Specify that a certain font is wanted; it then acts like a built-in
font.
- Squeak then asks the platform to draw the characters.
There are issues wrt moving an image to a new platform, but I think they
can be handled so long as 'Squeak itself' uses built-in, portable fonts.
Maybe I'm all wet here, with a quickly proposed solution that might not
work. Regardless, there needs to be SOME solution to the Squeak font problem.
The current font support sucks. The TT converter doesn't work on a Mac, it
does work on Windoze but only at 32 point and above. It doesn't fix the problem.
One cannot claim to have the worlds greatest multimedia content builder,
then admit to having only three fonts with fixed sizes.
Dave
Chris, thanks for reminding me that I've been going to complain too.