Antony Blakey wrote:
On 20/10/2008, at 10:48 AM, John M McIntosh wrote:
Well for one thing it requires then implementing the freetype plugin on the iPhone, so it's a barrier to entry for VM developers who are dealing with platforms that may or may not have freetype on them to enable the running of a pharo image.
In that is the case, then I think a stated requirement for Pharo should be a list of platforms, or an explicit statement that it must be usable without FreeType.
I would vote for the latter. I would vote strongly against leaving out Squeak's "native" text rendering. With Squeak native I mean a method to render text without any external libraries, e.g. for systems like SqueakNOS, bare metal systems etc. What needs to be done is a proper refactoring of the text, font and text style system so the different rendering mechanisms are easily interchangeable and transparent to the programmer. Michael