Font Manager & Big Fonts

[ericlob@cris.com (ericlob)]

Nathan Mates <nathan@visi.com> wrote:
>
>   Lots of people have looked at the Font problem, quite possibly
>starting with the Pointless folks, but there's no good answer at
>all. Basically, when Apple designed the GS, they decided to try and
>skimp on bytes, limiting fonts to 255 points. There are only 8 bits
>(==256 possibilities) for font size, and extending that would require
>rewriting both the Font Manager *and* every app using it. Not gonna
>happen. It's a pretty shortsighted limitation, especially if the GS
>was supposed to be anywhere near the DTP mac.

After looking at it, my thoughts were that the best solution would
be to add new functions to the font manager toolset (InstallFont2,
etc) and patch Pointless. People without TrueType fonts probably
wouldn't print larger anyway.

>   And as to why the patch vs totally new version, on the GS, if you
>patch out, you can still use the old functions, such as drawing fonts
>to screen, resizing bitmap-only fonts, putting up dialogs to get font
>input, etc. That's a better approach than trying to duplicate Apple's
>work and get a whole lot more bugs, incompatabilities, and not be
>guaranteed to work with the "next" OS revision from Apple.

No, I meant why didn't Apple just add the new code to the toolset rather
than having TS2 patch them out.

>   Another consideration: large fonts take up exponentially more
>memory. As a test, I saved off Times at 250 point size (62 points high
>when printed on a 300dpi printer like a laserwriter/inkjet) is 743K on
>disk. Say you want a 125 point printout font, and that'd be 4x larger
>or almost 3MB. For one font. Are you sure your GS would handle such
>things? [Yes, Pointless 2.0.x only renders off characters as needed,
>but you do that on 2-3 fonts at once, and you're very quickly out of

Unless you were working with a really complicated document, you probably
wouldn't have 250 glyphs even with several fonts. Pointless should be
smart enough to purge unneeded renders anyway.

And yes, this would slow things down considerably, just like 600dpi
printing would, but it would do alot towards making the GS a semi-viable
home publishing platform.