FFont: A "standard" flattened font representation.

• Version 1.0: ZIP Archive (14K) (ZIP 2.2n BETA)

FFont is two things:

1. A proposal for a standard flattened font representation, used in BMessages and other things, so that applications written by different developers can share font information without any special work.
2. An implementation of the above proposal that can be incorporated into other applications, and is (hopefully) both easy to use and flexible.

Feature Short-List

• Font objects are stored in BMessage objects as single self-contained types, making them easy to work with and manipulate.
• Partial font descriptions can be created, allowing constructs such as "set current font to point size 12."
• Takes care of all architecture portability issues.
• Makes use of existing BeOS APIs (such as the BFlattenable interface) as much as possible.

Brief Description

The code here is the outcome of some discussion that occurred on the Be Developer Talk mailing list about how to represent font objects that are stored in BMessages. The intent was to create a proposal that would be widely useful to developers, rather end up with everyone storing fonts in their own ad-hoc way. By using this protocol, you will be able to easily exchange font information with any other application that also adopts it.

I would greatly appreciate any comments, suggestions, or problems you have with tis code, so that I can improve it to be more useful!

History

September 22, 1997

First public release.

Copyright

This web page is copyright ©1999 Angry Red Planet. Copyrights for the individual packages described in this page are described in their respective archive.