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#1 2007-03-21 04:48:50

serge
Scratcher
Registered: 2007-03-11
Posts: 9

What About the fonts ??

Just a question about the fonts in scratch.
Scratch uses its own fonts, it's seems to be bitmap fonts.
When we are in wide screen mode, we have a bad quality,and it's worst when you send the project on a TV .

Do you think that you can in the future, allow true type fonts and allow the users to import truetype fonts in scratch ???

Thank you for the informations.

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#2 2007-03-22 22:09:13

johnm
Scratcher
Registered: 2007-03-08
Posts: 100+

Re: What About the fonts ??

You're right, Scratch has fonts built in and they are simple bitmap fonts.

We may need to switch to using external fonts in order to support international character sets. We are starting that project this summer, however, so it will be a some time before an internationalized version of Scratch is available.

However, I'm not sure how much truetype fonts would help on a monitor designed for video (wide screen or TV) due to the lack of resolution. We have a large plasma display and *everything* looks bad on it in wide-screen mode, not just Scratch. What we do to increase readability on that display is to increase the font sizes (for example, in a web browser). But we are not currently planning to support that sort of scaling in Scratch--the Scratch UI is far more complex than a web page so it would be really hard to support multiple scales.

I don't want to be discouraging, but I do want to realistic expecations for what sort of displays will work well for Scratch.

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#3 2009-07-31 01:39:36

billyedward
Scratcher
Registered: 2008-01-03
Posts: 500+

Re: What About the fonts ??

I see what you are saying. Even after the introduction of system fonts in 1.3, there is still the pixelation problem in presentation mode. The real solution to this is, of course, to have the stage be dynamically resizable, and have blocks to respond to this.
However, this would be very confusing to beginners, and would be hard to implement. The next best thing is antialiasing. But from what I've seen of smalltalk, ain't gonna happen. But for now, the fonts are a good start.


"I'd love to change the world, but they haven't released the source code yet."
Check out the latest version of Streak --> http://billy.scienceontheweb.net/Streak

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