>Surfing the swiki I found "Freetype font support" in
>http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3192 and it
>also looks really nice (and
>it's using render with smoothing judging on the screenshot).
I wrote this package and it is contains several things;
* A new bitblt mode (one where you can combine a color with a alpha
mask, this way you can have smooth fonts with any color and low memory
usage). This mode is a special case of mode 34 and may also be handy
for general use.
* A different primitive character scanner procedure (one that
understands some more about advances etc). I think the best solution
is to do the entire character scanning (ie layout) in squeak. This
should be done with internationalisation in mind (I think Yoshiki-san
can say more about this)
* A plugin to convert ttf fonts into bitmaps (using freetype). Once a
font is converted into several bitmap fonts (ie sizes) you do not need
freetype any longer.
I did not know about the win32 native fonts back then and so these
efforts are not very compatible (I did make it more compatible with
the native truetype rendering effort but I don't know if this is in
the version on the wiki).
>I guess these pieces of work can be mixed and voila!, nice fonts
>everywhere!
A good font system should contain these items;
* font look-up (see fontconfig(X11) or atsui(OSX))
* font layout/character placement (see pongo, atsui, win32?)
* character rendering (see Xft, atsui, win32)
* character displaying
Currently our font look-up is simply a dictionary in TextConstants, our
layout is in the character scanner (and is very basic) all the
characters are pre-rendered (ie bitmap) and the displaying is done
with bitblt.
Arjen