World: r3wp

as it's with the GD library in PHP

(but it depends on freetype, so it would be big:-)

anyway GD is using it's own font format (gdf), so why not to have 
rebol font format?

what is font anyway? it's just a small picture with information how 
big it is. I'm not sure if Flash 9 supports kerning, but in the older 
versions - font is just a array of shapes with widths mapped to unicode 
ids.

Oldes, I believe R3 will have support for embedded fonts. We might 
also add suport for embedding of bitmapped fonts(your favorite feature 
isn't it ;))

(font = I should say a font glyph)

yes, I like bitmapped fonts, I prefer pixel graphics:)

and bitmapped font can improve performance, as you don't ned to do 
all the resizing and antialiasing and other actions which must be 
done to display vector font

Actually there shouldn't be any performance difference as the vector 
glyphs are first rasterized into a font cache and then used.

just imaging the fun that you could add picture to any key code, 
so as you would type, you would display images instead of chars:-)

(unles you are not using the VECTORIAL mode in DRAW)

ok, I'm looking forward:-)

Hm I'm really not sure about embedded fonts in REBOL, specially in 
own format.

Why?

I'm not sure if it's really useful feature - requires some code, 
who's gonna draw fonts in some special format (or who's going to 
write some convertor)...

for bitmap fonts, this could be very nice.

just one last thought, it would be good to make it independent on 
X-win under linux - As you may want to be able do graphic operations 
on server which is not running x-win (most servers)

Actually you can do it even in current rebol. See the source of the 
quick-hack.r  demo. It has one vectorial font ebedded already.

Rebolek - I will do - And look at Flash - All flash apps are using 
embedded fonts, how can you ask if we need it in Rebol?

And if it can be done in REBOL already I definitely do not see why 
add that feature native. I think effort should be put in much more 
needed things.

Rebolek: My idea is to be able for example read installed ttf font 
and store it using some native function in DRAW format. Then you 
can embedded any font in your app.

I think having our own font format could bring more independency 
to REBOL. we would also be able to include fonts not necessarily 
present on the target machine

Cyphre: and you're going to write that parser? You really have so 
much time?

Currently fonts for linux and OSX is a mess.

The 'parser' is already there. Hod do you thing DRAW is getting the 
TTF fonts?

cyphre, parsing is native for speed, right?

that's why not to use own, if the angine just rasterize font to chache, 
why we just cannot draw into this cache to get own fonts?

Actully I though it's done by some system functions

Yes, we are currently using WinAPI(on Windows) and Fretype(under 
Linux) for that.

But DRAW needs to somehow interpret the parsed font data to be able 
rasterize it. Ofcourse it would need some additional code but most 
of the things we need for the ability to embed any ttf font is there.

Oldes, exactly. To be able to use bitmapped fonts we need to be able 
'draw into the cache' so this is also doable.

And I don't think this would add too much of Rebol size so I believe 
this will be added to the R3.

Hm, we'll see. I just hope some much more needed things will be adressed 
in R3 too.

Yes, there is still much more important stuff in queue at the moment.

cyphre, do you expect that the new and faster SHOW would be postponed 
to R3? is it tested?

(I don't know what's involved, so I just call it "new and faster 
SHOW" :-))

R3 will have completely new and faster blitting. I don't think Carl 
would like to waste time with improving the R2 engine but I can ask 
him ;)

one argument would be that we could get it tested, but that depends 
if you can slap it into R2 in 5 minutes :-)

if it takes weeks, then that's better spent working on R3

I don't think the problem is with testing in this case. (Either it 
works or not ;)) But I'm afraid it would need some deep changes in 
R2.

then it's a bad idea

Oldes: re. Unicode, other than display you also need input, which 
is what Jerry is requesting

yes, that's true:(

Regarding sinoglyph, the source was available here:   http://www.xuehanyu.org/sinoglyph.r

I know the author was working on an english translation also

It looks like it is done, or mostly so, anyways.

Gabriele, 

Actually, Oldes is right. Showing two-byte characters is good enough. 
IME is not necessary for REBOL/View, because every Chinese/Japanese/Korea 
OS has proper IMEs installed. IME sends the codes encoded in the 
OS codepage to the focused window. For Example, If the codepage used 
by Windows XP is Big5 and I type in the Character which means one 
( #{A440} in Big5, #{4E00} in Unicode, see http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=4E00
), my REBOL/View program will get two key events sequentially, which 
are #{A4} and #{40}. REBOL/View shows it as two characters instead 
of one. I hope that REBOL/View can let the OS do the text-drawing, 
like the REBOL/core console does. REBOL/core console doesn't have 
the Chinese-Character-Showing issue, because it basically send the 
#{A4} and #{40} to the console, and let the OS do the text-drawing. 
the OS knows that #{A4} and #{40} should be combine to one Big5 Character, 
so it just show it as one character. Of course, if I type in two 
ASCII characters, the OS is smart enough not to combine them into 
one "non-existing" Big5 Character. CJK encodings are supersets of 
ASCII, just like UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII.


It's nothing to do with Unicode, so it is not too difficult to fix, 
I guess. Please fix this in 2.7.5 or 2.7.6 please ... 

It's on my wish list for Santa Claus this year.

Jerry, displaying is not as easy as it seems, because REBOL uses 
its own text routines. I don't think we have enough resources to 
put the effort on R2, but you can try sending a message to Carl about 
this. (Every request increases the priority a bit.)

squeaky wheel?

Gabriele, Thanks for the explanation. Since it's not as easy as it 
seems, I am not going to disturb Carl for this request. I want REBOL 
3.0 even more. I don't want to waste RT's resources.


By the way, my Zhuyin (Bopomofo) Input Method Editor is in progress. 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin_table) There are some bugs and 
the interface is not good-looking, but being in progress is good 
enough for me, for now. At least I know where I am going now.