[sugar] X fonts, and Cairo fonts

[Alan Kay]

Hi Marco --

Animation of lots of Cairo objects is not "free" on the XO (it is in 
fact severely limited right now, especially if collision detection is 
also needed), so we just have to widen the point of view to include 
larger issues to see what Bert is driving at.

Cheers,

Alan

At 03:49 AM 3/14/2007, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 12:21 +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> > On Mar 14, 2007, at 12:10 , Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> >
> > > And anyway it seem sane to try and be resolution independent (both
> > > dpi and actual screen size/ratio).
> >
> > Given fixed hardware and severe performance limits, is this still
> > "sane"? Isn't the XO much more like a game console than a PC in the
> > sense that optimizing to that specific hardware gets you much more
> > than you could ever achieve by trying to be general? For example,
> > like in game development, you could have the original artwork be
> > resolution-independent but then you pre-render this to the resolution
> > that it's actually needed at.
>
>Given the current architecture (cairo, svg, layout system), from a
>performance point of view, I think resolution independence comes
>basically for free. We are already doing device to user transformations.
>
> >From a code complexity point of view, once HippoCanvas is made a little
>smarter I think it would be transparent.
>
>It has some design costs (a certain design will work better at a certain
>resolution), but we don't have to pay it now. We can optimize design on
>the XO resolution.
>
>The advantages seems a lot:
>
>* I don't care about screen rotation a lot at the moment. But when we
>will have a touchscreen I will care. (when rotated the screen size in
>pixels and the ratio is different).
>* We can make Sugar feel good also on traditional laptops. That's
>important if nothing else for development. Also this is probably a long
>term thing but... I'd like to be able to use the stuff we are working
>on.
>* If the screen size/ratio changes in some future revision, reoptimizing
>sugar for it will be easier.
>
>In the end, I don't think it's an absolute requirement, but it's nice to
>have and I don't see a reason to not do it.
>
>Marco
>
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