> Matt wrote: > > <major snippage> > > > It's been at the ttflib Yahoogroups site for about a year or so > > now, I don't think I touched it since February either. At the > > least it's a fancy interface to the bullet API that I *will* > > leverage to get fancy fonts in Voyager (quite essential for CSS) > > Well, you can cite at least one user who's with you on this one. > Fancy fonts... CSS... yup, I want that.
There's a little way to go until we get either though. I am a little concerned about support for my code since while coexisting with standard Amiga font support is easy enough (and easily compiled in or left out..) it does rely on things that only a person with a graphics card and a little memory (we're talking machines with 24MB or more..) would have. The font library takes up space for glyphs and a small amount of structure overhead, but that's it. But that doesn't stop a font used for headings, or large amounts of fancy effects, making a few glyphs suck up a few megabytes. Even Ken's system will suffer this. I would be perfectly happy to ditch AGA users and those of you who run on a minimal specification Amiga (we recommend 8MB don't we, for Voyager?) but I'm sure others on the team and certainly those users would be p**sed. Maybe I could make it work only on MorphOS (this gives maximum flexibility) or whatever other OS appears (since more advanced RTG systems are required for some stuff), and offer very limited support on AmigaOS 3.x .. this gets very complex indeed when you have to cull your userbase for a certain feature. So much so that I wouldn't do it. It is certainly not a question of processing power. I am a firm believer in that if you have a 10 year old machine you can just damn well wait for a webpage to render, there is no point in breaking out the assembler optimisations and fancy hacks. But without memory, you get no graphics. And without disk space for the fonts (some of them are 2 or 3MB each.. contrast 500k for a standard Truetype font.. or go right up to 24MB for the full Unicode glyph set) then you are limited in the look of your page. It would also force users to install an outline font solution, or use bullet.library (although that DOES give us a Helvetica clone, a Times clone, Courier.. the standard web fonts) Just out of interest.. what's the average spec of your machines? Oh. And then someone has to validate the CSS parser. I've been taking a look at the Mozilla one and it's very different to our internal one. Making it poke simple values (font sizes, colours, shapes, borders.. things we already support) into the HTML rendering subsystem is EASY but parsing CSS might well be the stick that breaks the donkey's poor little back. And it's legs. And it's neck. And puts it in a wheelchair and eating baby food for the rest of it's life. :) -- Matt Sealey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
