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On Fonts and point Sizes
Last updated at 5:25 pm UTC on 4 September 2009
High-quality font support

Traditional typography


In traditional typography, the point referred to the size of the metal block used to carve shapes (glyphs). The size of a Point depended on regional/political affiliations :-). Anglo-american point was about 72.27 points to an inch. Not all shapes would be contained within its metal block base. Some (see g in the picture http://ilovetypography.com/2008/03/23/sunday-type-bright-type/) would also extend (kern) beyond its base. String length would be the sum of metal block widths. The sum of shape widths in a run of characters could differ from the string length due to kerns.

Digital Typography


Digital typography uses co-ordinate grids instead of a metal block. It defines Point (aka DTP point or Postscript point) as 1/72th of an inch. Grid size varies for different fonts. TTF uses grids of 512, 1024 or 2048. The point size used in font names are 'design size'. i.e. a modern 12pt TTF contains glyphs drawn inside a 2048x2048 grid that will look like a 12pt metal typeface when scaled to various digital canvases like a 96dpi screen or 1200 dpi printer.

Though we continue using the term glyph (carving), images are computed on the grid using a pictal process and then scaled to the target canvas. A Truetype font is actually a bytecode program interpreted by a font engine (e.g. Freetype) to scale glyphs at run time. Internally, glyphs are defined in terms of lines and curves in a grid (called em-square) of size 512, 1024 or 2048. Given a canvas (dpi, depth), a glyph code and a point size, the font engine will scale a glyph and tweak them using 'hints' expressed in bytecodes. For instance, stretching a '(' vertically may scale only the middle part and leave the tips alone. The top curve of o in "xo" will slightly overshoot x for good visual flow.

However, aesthetic rendering requires a context and a run of characters. The spacing between one character to the next is dictated by kern and direction. Sometimes, adjacent glyphs may coalesce into a more compact or even different shape (e.g. ffi) called a ligature. Runs are handled by a text rendering engine (e.g. Pango, Qt, ghostscript). Of course, the ligated glyph shape should exist in the font.

Fonts in Squeak

Squeak's text printing algorithms only consider boxes and kerns - no ligatures, no hyphenation, no direction. Building a true multilingual layout engine is a non-trivial task. Mac and Wintel have only one shaping engine while Linux has multiple options (Pango, Qt, ICU, m17n, Graphite). Pango and Qt are widely used. Squeak should be able detect and load shaping engines on the fly on Linux or allow command line options to pick a wrapper plugin.

There is also the blue plane approach proposed in FoNC paper - treat text
boxes like graphic objects. A glyph is much more complex than a graphic and needs a specialized editor not only to deal with precisely
proportioned geometric curves but also extract metrics like baselines and kerns for laying out these glyphs in boxes. A Font engine is just a specialized vector graphic editor that avoids intensive geometric computations by caching precomputed shapes in a glyph table. Glyphs could be associated with class level editors. Then when a glyph is missing for a character code, instead of display $?, the editor can be invoked to create a new shape on the fly.

Subbu