Cream Font

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Cream font for Squeak (aka "PaloAlto" font)

Nostalgia! Maybe you have dug out the 1981 BYTE special Smalltalk issue, or seen old screenshots of Smalltalk-76 systems. Now you can have the funky font, too. (This was converted from a very old Mac PD CD-ROM (it was called "PaloAlto" and in 12 point only.)

It looks like this (in combination with the syntax coloring from above):

The StrikeFont file is here (3 KB). To play with it, use something along the lines of

((Note 25may00: With Stefan Matthias Aust's FontSet stuff incorporated into Squeak 2.8a2136, there is an easier way, with full integration into the system's catalog of TextStyles etc. Try this fileIn (4 KB) if your Squeak is at that level. No need to fuss with the PaloAlto.sf2 above, then.))

| sf |
sf := StrikeFont new readFromStrike2: 'PaloAlto12.sf2'.
TextStyle default fontAt: 6 put: sf.
TextConstants at: #PaloAlto put: (TextStyle fontArray: (Array with: sf))

in a Workspace. You could then use the Browser's shift-menu to see the TextStyle in action.

Here's what Dan Ingalls remarked about it:

"Bob Flegal designed that font, and called it Cream at the time, because it was so smooth. It was an experiment to make a font with the minimum number of elements (a, c, d, g, etc. all have the same curve for instance). This turns out not to be a great idea for a workaday font, actually. We realized this after about a month. You would be looking at a browser and after a while your mind would sort of pop into neutral, waiting to recognize some words, but getting no strong clues from any of the characters -- they all just looked the same!"