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Innotek font engine extended to WPS

Started by Barbara, 2008.09.28, 14:27:06

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Barbara

Hallo, i've discovered that the innotek font engine can be extended to the WPS adding
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\InnoTek\InnoTek Font Engine\Applications\PMSHELL.EXE
Enabled=dword:00000001
to the registry.
Now the desktop can use fonts like Inconsolata an Vesa Sans, just like Linux Ubuntu.
Can this helps?
Some screenshots.

Ben

Greetings, Barbara.

Yes, this is true. I've tried it many times over the years.

However, I've always found that it makes the WPS unstable, as Innotek warned us.

I know some have had good success with it, but, while it makes the desktop look sharp, I've never been able to keep it on for long.

I hope you have better luck with it...

Make sure that you have a pre-WPS-font-enhancement archive.

Saijin_Naib

Indeed. What version are you using Barbara? 2.40 or 2.60 Beta?

Barbara

The one included in eCS 2.0RC5, i think it should be 2.40.

Ben

Hmm..

I haven't tried version 2.6 beta on the WPS... though it is the one that I'm now using.

I'll have to give it a try and see what happens.

Barabara, have you had any crashes yet?

Barbara

No crash. It seems stable and all works fine. But needs also SET SDDFONTDPI=96 var in config.sys (SNAP). I don't know if Panorama VESA support it.

RobertM

Hi tried it, and gave up (found too many instability issues or other weird things - especially when, as it was prone to do, 2.x versions of Firefox "crashed" the IFE).

Instead, I just use System VIO for my desktop, as it renders pretty cleanly and clearly.

The only issue I had with that was I'd mistakenly set the menus to System VIO as well - which does not work well with v2 or earlier builds of FF (they use the OS/2 designated fonts for menus) - I'd get menus that looked like this:

File
New W...
New T...
Open L...


etc...

Not very helpful.

Alas, though IFE seems to produce better results in handling certain characters (at the least) such as "W", "N", "M", etc (the diagonal portions are often way thicker than the rest of the characters using Cairo on FF3.01), Cairo seems a lot more stable, and quicker.

Actually, in typing this, I am noticing that in FF3.02, the diagonal parts of the characters seem to be correct widths... so maybe that isnt an issue anymore either. I wonder if Cairo can eventually be used as the rendering replacement for the WPS (like how IFE could be used for it)?

Robert


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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abwillis

I used 2.60 beta here with pmshell and it was mostly stable but there were a few instances that was fairly certain that were caused by IFE.  I mostly stopped using it because I couldn't say the fonts were "better", different yes but I can't say "better". 
With FF 3+ IFE is redundant, Fontconfig includes FT2 and does the antialiasing.
Andy

The Blue Warper

#8
Yes, the PMSHELL.EXE trick was a known one.  I used it for a long time, but I randomly got WPS oddities, such as the process eating more and more memory or WPS restarts followed by fonts no longer rendered by the IFE until next reboot.  Another (minor, perhaps) issue was that some help (.INF and .HLP) documents beeped when displaying pages with some special characters (or perhaps some special character set?): notably the XWP Guide (which at that time I used to view often in order to learn all the features).
This surely happened till 2.40 included.  I found 2.60 beta to be a lot more stable, but I don't remember if the help file problem was fixed in this last version.

RobertM:
As for Cairo "being eventually used as the rendering replacement for the WPS", this is AFAIK the goal of the Voyager project hosted at Netlabs.org.  Cairo would be a sort of system-wide graphics engine, responsible for window drawing, animation, manipulation, font rendering, and so on.