Japanese Font

I have almost fixed problems related with Japanese font in Squeak 3.8. These are very complicated, but what is good for me is I could be familiar with font mechanism. The main issue around showing font is how characters should be shown in any rectangle beautifully. Before I fixed, Japanese characters were shown roughly and sometimes tearing. This is because Japanese font is shown implicitly when Japanese character is appeared even if a user select Latin font like accuny. I am interested in Font system because Font in Smalltalk has long history. Abe-san said Smalltalk-80 had StrikeFont class same as Squeak. Also, font is very important as one of the design elements. Personally, I think Squeak should handle commercial fonts more easily. Some squeakers says it is enough to use free fonts. But friends of mime who are artists prefer sophisticated commercial fonts, and I want Squeak attracts such art guys. Especially, Japanese free fonts are much few as there has huge amount of characters. Other aspect why I tried around font is I want to reduce my work. Now Japanese version of Squeak is a bit different with latest English distribution. So I have to port my application for Japanese Squeak when I develop some tools in English. That was much boring thing (actually, sometimes I show English version Squeak demos even for Japanese people, but my mother couldn't understand it and complain me...). When my work finished, and basic parts of both Japanese and English Squeak become same, what I need is just prepare a translation data.

Textual representation of tile scripting

I couldn't this blog these days because this site was toooo slowly... I am working a lot about etoys these days. Actually, I did not know about etoys well before I had my own etoys workshop because I felt it's ability was too restricted. But I have found that a number of interesting things are remained in the tile scripting system yet. Surely, etoys lacks fancy features as programming language. But I don't think rich system is better system. So I have tried to small improvement etoys without big change. One of my challenges is textual representation of tile scripting. As you know, you can see tile script both as tile and text code (Smalltalk expression). But when you modify the text code, the script would be never seen as tile as the script loses the modified information. I think this is a reason why serious Squeak programmer is not interested in etoys. If tile script is made from textual representation. A programmer could write applications with etoys tile script by Smalltalk code (change set, Monticello, or so). So I have write converter between text and tiles. At first, Smalltalk expression is hard to convert to tiles. And I use S-expression like notation. It works almost well. I am going to make some examples of etoys animation without any drag-n-drop!