[Etoys] Heap expansion with big truetype fonts

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Oct 17, 2007, at 15:13 , Luke Gorrie wrote:

> Howdy!
>
> We've found that memory usage shoots through the roof when we use
> large truetype fonts with pointsize around 200-300. We've posted
> details and a project file that reproduces our problem at
> http://nepal.ole.org/ and it'd be great if a Squeak guru could take a
> peek and give some hints!

We have a problem with colored TT font rendering. In your test  
project, if you remove the drop shadow in your example, memory  
consumption stays sane. My guess is that with a drop shadow,  
rendering switches between black and blue constantly, thrashing the  
TT glyph cache.

Btw, your games are beautiful! Switching projects is quite slow on  
the XO (up to 20 secs), not sure why that is. But it looks great and  
once in the game it is fast enough. Sound did not work on my joyride  
build (fine on the Mac). And the purple UI is somewhat dark in  
reflective screen mode because of the way the DCON maps colors to  
gray levels.

A quick way of testing it on an XO is putting your image onto a USB  
Flash drive in a folder named "olpc-dev", and rename it to  
"etoys.image". Then clicking the Etoys icon will use that alternate  
image (we put that in for debugging).

If you can make an SVG activity icon I can help you create a  
proper .xo activity bundle from it (unless you have that already).

And did you think about Journal integration and sharing, yet?

- Bert -