drawing text on MacOS X fails

[rozek]

Hello!

I am currently investigating REBOL to see if I can use it for the development of (small) platform-independent programs.

Graphics capabilities will be an important point.

Some stuff is working already, but I can't achieve anti-aliased text under Mac OS X! Using the most recent View release of REBOL 2 for Mac OS X, I am trying s.th. like

    view layout [ 
     box 200x160 effect [draw [ 
        pen black 
        text 10x20 "Test" 
     ]] 
    ]

with lots of variations (with/without font specification, various pen/fill-pen/line-width settings etc.) The "effect" seems to work under Windows, but not under Mac OS X. I even tried the tip found at http://www.compkarori.com/vanilla/display/AGG (after adapting it to Mac OS X with its differnt font paths), but never got any display.

Adding a "line" command displayed that line, though - thus, I am quite certain that my commands should be basically correct.

Does anybody have any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Graham]

I think text effects only work on Windows and Linux. I'll ask around to check.

[Graham]

See http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlMYDC

Rebol lacks access to the glyph data on OSX so can not do the antiaiiased text. It does not look as though this will be ever fixed for Rebol2, and you may have to wait for Rebol3.

[rozek]

Graham,

thanks for your quick response!

That sounds bad! Proper text rendering is a major feature - aliased text just looks terribly ugly (especially when compared to other applications running on the same desktop that use anti-aliased fonts...) This makes it really difficult for me to use REBOL 2 - and REBOL 3 seems to be far away from an official relase.