On Jul 26, 2008, at 11:21 , Lukas Renggli wrote:
BTW, I've been investigating NiceFonts
(http://www.jvuletich.org/NiceFonts.html) and I'm in
contact with Juan who helped me with it
I agree, these fonts look very pleasing to the eye.
Yes, the quality is good. (Compared to the typeface in the screenshot,
I'd prefer a monospace typeface, though.)
However as far as I understand the approach would break with any
unicode/internationalization effort. The world is not ASCII anymore.
It simply does not scale to have 95,221 glyphs for every font-family,
font-size, font-weight, etc. Or is there something I am overlooking?
You are right in that this approach does not scale if we want to
provide fonts for all scripts of the world. Its just makes sense for a
few font sizes and families (3x3?).
However, this is not the point. I just want to make a small step to
have a more professional *default* font replacing the crappy one we
have now, rather than finding an optimal solution. The fonts currently
shipped with Squeak also do not support other scripts than latin. If
you want to write your code in Thai, you have to install such a font
first.
NiceFonts is a hack. Nevertheless, it has the potential to provide an
intermediate solution until we have FreeType support with sub-pixel
antialiasing in the VM. Unfortunately, although people seem to have
been working on this for several years now, it has been widely used
nor has become part of the VM. NiceFonts just adds support to create
new StrikeFonts, it does not prevent you from loading other fonts, so
nothing needs to be sacrificed. Moreover, I want to be able to unload
those fonts again to save memory for server images.
I think it would be a mistake to wait until there is a perfect
solution (this mistake has been done too often in the history of
Squeak...). Unless somebody suggests a better alternative, I think we
should figure out whether NiceFonts does the job or not.
Damn, already talking again! ;)
Cheers,
Adrian
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