its fontastic!

Late Friday I reached a minor milestone when I got the platform-independent part of WebCore fully compiling and linking. Next up, the tricky bit: the platform dependent stuff, otherwise known as the actual port.

I spent a couple of hours staring at various WebCore classes trying to make sense of them, and eventually I started to get a feel for the structure, though I’m a long way off really understanding it. Basically, WebCore has classes for common GUI elements, like fonts, menus, and so on. To do a port, you have to reimplement these classes to wrap the same functionality in whatever graphics system you happen to be targeting. It was around this point I realised that I know basically nothing about the AROS GUI toolkit, known as Zune.

I had a look around for examples and documentation, and I started to see what was going on, but a lot of the code is a mess and its hard to get a clear picture of what’s happening in my head. The only option left to me is to write a small application using some of the Zune features that I’ll need to get an idea of what makes it tick.

I thought about it a bit on Saturday and today spent a couple of hours implementing a this little app that I call fonty:

Its a font preview program. You give it a font name and point size, and it’ll render some text in that font. We already have stuff like it, so its not particularly useful, but so far I’ve learnt about the basic structure of a Zune application, how to make a Zune custom widget class (I have a seperate FontPreview custom class), and how the Amiga font system works. It’ll soon have a context menu that allows selecting different styles, and changing the text. Again, not really great in terms of usability, but lets me see how everything works. And kinda fun to write too :)