WELCOME, WELCOME, WELCOME!

[richmond62]

I am pretty sure the trouble comes from a very large number of images being created, and LC's internal buffering of the screen eventually breaks down.

Of course there is the possibility that you could achieve what you want to achieve by going round things in a different way (and, after all, LC?OXT lends itself to doing most things in several ways.

What you did not really do in your earlier posting is explain what should be the form and the function of your work.

[neville]

Ah, I still have to get my head around what development is going on here. So I take it two teams/ persons are working on different forks. I think I have downloaded the "heavy" version.

Still catching up on the forum backlog, and haven't even got to the point of firing up my stacks in OxT yet, but my initial impressions...

There seems to be mention of (eventual inclusion of) versions/lookalikes of LCB, but not LCS (Aargh, that could be a deal breaker, Server is much more important than Builder, to me anyway).

The IDE I am looking at has icons for IOS and Android native buttons, but it doesn't seem Mobile deployment is on the radar?

Compiling for Apple Silicon is fixable?/fixed?

I presume the bug list will eventually include a) bugs that existed in 9.6.3 not yet fixed in LC 9.6.12 and b) bugs fixed by the other side since 9.6.3. There's a mountain to climb there.

In relation to b) I was just in an email conversation with Bob Sneidar who mentioned two problems he had with LC Community: the IDE Find Dialog was broken, and secondly performance of the LC engine had significantly improved since 9.6.3. Not clear to me in what area he experienced sluggish performance but I will be interested to see how my stacks behave.

In relation to a) I am expecting to find that major bugs in the font engine have not been tackled: it is impossible to access most modern font styles in Windows, and that means 90% of modern fonts, because of the way start using font works with names; trying to get the style of a font stopped working on the Mac since LC 2.something or thereabouts (only the classic font styles bold italic are even considered and it reports nonsense anyway); and start using font can easily crash. The font engine in LC needs a re-write from scratch, and I would be astonished if that has happened here. Unfortunately not an area in which I can offer any expertise, I am good at finding bugs not so good at fixing them. [But I see Brian has joined us, and he can fix anything.]

Must rush, the dog needs her breakfast. Such fun!

[neville]

Of course there is the possibility that you could achieve what you want to achieve by going round things in a different way (and, after all, LC?OXT lends itself to doing most things in several ways.

Regretfully, extremely unlikely in this case, but always something to keep in mind.

What you did not really do in your earlier posting is explain what should be the form and the function of your work.

Well it wasn't a bug report, that will come later if indeed it is a bug. I was just fishing to see if someone might have seen the symptoms (flashing of stale buffered screen images when the IDE stutters to a halt) rather than expecting someone to diagnose the disease. And as to what I am trying to achieve, all will be revealed - in my younger days this project would have been completed yesterday, but give me a few months...

[FourthWorld]

Hi Richard
Yes Go has been my other addiction for 50 years. I have been a Director of the International Go Federation for a number of years, although I am about to retire from that position.

I rediscovered tabletop games only a few years ago. Such a wonderful journey. I've only dipped my toe into the Go waters so far, but it strikes me as one mankind's greatest inventions. Thank you for helping the world enjoy it.

[neville]

Well this is fascinating. [ I suppose this is still relevant to the WELCOME thread]

I just tried my stack in OxT Lite, after negotiating the Privacy and Security hoops to get past the gatekeeper. Stack opened very quickly, nice looking updates to the palettes tool, stack seems quite zippy, no problems with sqlite database upload/download (in fact seems quicker than LC's but that's probably my imagination). May be some extremely slight speed problems with animations, but again I might be imagining things.

But an eye-opener when I tried my first drag-and-drag. A dialog I have never before seen in any app pops up: "OpenXTalk Lite would like to read the computer screen and audio. " with an approval needed. Which suggests to me that the engine may be getting the MacOS to do the screen buffering, and that my afore-mentioned bug may be a MacOS problem, not an LC one (or at the very least would help pinpoint where the bug lies if indeed it is an engine flaw); it definitely would explain why the whole Mac seems to be having problems not just my stack when it ground to a halt.

Anyway, once approved drag and drop worked fine, so I am a happy puppy so far (so is my well-fed greyhound).

Some other random thoughts re my previous ramblings:

* Yes Richard, Go is undoubtedly one of mankind's greatest and most beautiful inventions.

* Don't know where I got the impression Mobile was not on the OxT radar. Still skim-reading the fora.

* Last time I walked around the university campus, the vast majority of students were using Mac laptops. Maybe a couple of Unix boxes. Hardly any Windows (tho' I didn't walk past the Business Faculty). So Richmond, maybe the Education sector has changed in recent years. But I forgot, don't mention the Mac-Arm-religious war, I just did but I think I got away with it.

Neville

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Of course there is the possibility that you could achieve what you want to achieve by going round things in a different way (and, after all, LC?OXT lends itself to doing most things in several ways.

Regretfully, extremely unlikely in this case, but always something to keep in mind.

What you did not really do in your earlier posting is explain what should be the form and the function of your work.

Well it wasn't a bug report, that will come later if indeed it is a bug. I was just fishing to see if someone might have seen the symptoms (flashing of stale buffered screen images when the IDE stutters to a halt) rather than expecting someone to diagnose the disease. And as to what I am trying to achieve, all will be revealed - in my younger days this project would have been completed yesterday, but give me a few months...

Welcome Neville!
(Neville the Devil, is my pet cat's name, btw)
Good to see another 80s HyperCard user like me!

You're right there is a mountain of threads on these forums. I'll try to briefly catch you and any other recent newcomers up...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First let me say, there is no team(s) here, there's only a community of xTalk refugees.
There are no expert C++ Software Engineers here (so far), so maybe don't get you hopes too high.

Sept. 1st 2021, LC Ltd. abandoned the open-source community edition.

Seth Morrow, Richmond, and myself and a few other people were all trying to collect all of the Community Installers that had been taken off-line (at the time), which we did and are just about all made available on Archive.org.

Then Seth and I discussed continuing FOSS xTalk, in particular keeping the LC community development effort alive. Seth graciously provided hosting for this forum and we began efforts for de-branding the IDE, which was the basic requirement for continuation. I made a new HC inspired icon (see top of page), and Seth and I began editing the many references to LC out of the Dictionary and IDE UI. That took much longer than I initially expected, over a year (I still occasionally find ones that were missed). A de-branded Dictionary was 'compiled'. When I say de-branded what I mean is most references to LC were replaced with a preferably generic term like 'xTalk script', 'the IDE','Extension Builder', etc.

Seth sort of faded to the background since he was too busy with real-life to work on OXT. So I began trying to fix and improve on the IDE mostly on my own, as I saw fit. There were a few contributions here and there from other community members (such as Terry Little), along the way.

I did make some early (unsuccessful) effort to try to recompile the engine on macOS. I'm no X-code C++ expert and I still do not even have an Apple Silicon Mac to work with so M-series CPU support wasn't going to happen from me. But I continued making non-Engine IDE bugs fixes, and I added a few features as well, like an extension macOS native 'DarkMode' support, HyperTalk 'playSentence' support (I'm a long-time MIDI Music tinkerer), new libraries of SVG Icons, things like that.

Then sometime in 2023, Tom Perry (tPerry2x) joined in making his own fork (OXT Lite) with more minimalist design goals. Around that time some other brilliant bloke named 'Tom' produced a binary patcher that fixed the launch-crashing on macOS Sonoma, however this patch may be the cause of some image corruption that Richmond was experience in standalone macOS app builds, so that's still a problem (although there may be a work-around ) that needs to be fixed in the macOS engine's source code.

Tom's joining in was actually perfect timing, because changes to my RL situation has made it so that I have significantly less time available to work on OXT. Tom really picked up the torch and ran. I've tried unsuccessfully to keep up with rolling his changes and fixes into my fork (which is not actually called 'Heavy' it's 'DPE' for Don't Panic Edition). I'm lagging behind.

Tom began trying to recompile the engines, and then we realized then that the 'Pre-Built' binaries that the build process was looking for were behind a password-wall on LC Ltd's server. Fortunately Mark Wielder was able to provide us with those binaries for building on Linux. Tom was able to get Linux Engine recompiled and removed the last piece of 'branding' which was a license checking stack that was embedded into the engines. I was able to compile a few of those missing dependencies from source, but a short while later we were able to get a hold of the rest of those missing binaries. Very recently Mark Welder has patched his fork of LC Community engine repo to pull in and compile those dependency binaries from their source (up to date ). So progress is (slowly) being made on the engine front.

On the IDE side of things both Tom and I continue work trying to make it better however we can.

That's where we are with the 'LC Community Edition' base part of OpenXTalk....
Despite what some people may think, OpenXTalk.org has always been about xTalk and more specifically open-source xTalk.
The LC CE code base may be the best cross-platform open-source xTalk interpreter that we have available to us, but OpenXTalk is NOT exclusively about the LC CE. (see the OXT Manifesto).
As such any other xTalk/xCard implementations (commercial or FOSS), such as SuperCard, OpenXION, StackSmith, ViperCard, HyperCard Simulator, etc. are more than welcome to be discussed on these forums.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for some of your specific questions/comments...

No changes have been made to the GUI-less server version. With the possible exception of Mark's updated Linux build, It's currently the exactly same as it was in LC CE 9.6.3. Although I don't personally use Server engine for anything, I have no intention of removing it. I'm also very interested in updating the Emscripten Web/HTML5 version of the engine.

LCB (for de-branding purposes I've been calling that XB / eXtension Builder) Widgets and Libraries (specially with foreign function interface) in my opinion is an extremely useful piece of the platform, and I have no intentions of removing it (I can't speak for Tom / OXT Lite). It's not at all mutually exclusive to whether or not we support the server version.

I'm not sure what your Font family problems are but I did do some work an Extension that provides some extra macOS font related capabilities. I'm sure if Tom made any fixes for Windows font problems. I'm mostly a Mac user (for now).

[neville]

That's a very helpful summary for us new-arrivals, thanks Paul.

On Server. Pleased to hear it is part of the OpenSource code (I think that is what you meant) but please keep this as a first-class citizen if possible. I use Server to authenticate remote access to a Dreamhost mySQL database: most ISPs install a non-secure version of mySQL so passwords are sent over the net in-clear, so it really is essential to put in a front-end using secure forms or sockets or some such to authenticate users before accessing a mySQL database. Most people would use php for this, but LC Server does an excellent job, is easier than php, and is less of a target for hackers (so far). The built-in sql database features of the LC engine are very convenient. I also use it to maintain and update a WordPress website, and as an intermediary between Wordpress and the database - SO much easier than Python or PHP for parsing text, and it interacts with javascript comfortably. Server is a remarkably useful tool.

On fonts: the problem is that most modern fonts come in varieties like Extra Light FantasticFont or whatever. In LC on Windows you only get to see "FantasticFont" in the listed available fonts (ie the font family). That is normal on Windows, but normal Windows apps would then find the individual font names/styles and offer it to the user. Except that LC doesn't know about styles like "Extra Light", with the result that such fonts just cannot be accessed; whereas Mac and Linux report the full name (mostly - sometimes it gets the name wrong: modern fonts offer names in a variety of languages and LC can pick the wrong one occasionally at least on the Mac; as I recall on Linux the font engine uses a less "smart" listing which may be less smart but which just works). As I mentioned, getting the "style" of a font hasn't worked on Mac for generations - maybe that's what your Extension addressed. I will dig out the LC Bugzilla report later.

Neville

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Ah, OK. I know at least some of this has been discussed a bit on our forums elsewhere.

But in short that work-in-progress extension uses macOS font manager API and gets the font listing as special URLs, which have additional info tacked on the end, which is the fonts internal PostScript printer font name. In addition the list may contain fonts that don't normally display in font menus, such as special UI fonts Apple has included in various versions of macOS (which are proprietary license) and I believe are usually invisible files in the System/Fonts folder. It's also capable of getting URLs for the fonts in Adobe's cloud font cache, which are normally invisible files that have been renamed with index numbers. Extracting these files from cache for moving to an offline computer or device can be an essential pre-press / printing task. This extension enable writing of scripts that can do that in bulk.

On macOS 11 test Mac here I do however already get Font Family members showing in the IDE font menu, but they aren't grouped together into font family sub-menus the way I'd prefer them to be. I'd bet someone could write a script to do that.

Screen Shot 2024-08-01 at 2.47.25 AM.png (120.06 KiB) Viewed 13180 times

When you say "modern font" I assume you mean OpenType .otf versus the older TrueType .ttf format. I did at one point start looking into parsing .otf file format so I could extract that internal name directly from .otf files, but haven't had time for that.

For more discussion of fonts please search for the related topics with the forum search.
I just don't want the Welcome thread to get turned into another one of our threads that go way off topic

[richmond62]

'tread' might be quite appropriate as we TREAD all over the original theme of this thread.

[tperry2x]

I am a happy puppy so far (so is my well-fed greyhound).

Hi Neville.
Welcome by the way - I'm glad you are getting along okay with OXT.
Is it possible to have a well fed greyhound? Mine is always hungry, but of course, as slim as a rake

[tperry2x]

I just don't want the Welcome tread to get turned into another one of our threads that go way off topic

+1 on this.
Also, is it possible to pin this part of a running history somewhere?

I think it's important to have a go-to place which is on the front page. Perhaps "The story so far..." or something like that.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Looking at Windows options for getting fonts now. It appears that Fonts are added to the Windows registry so maybe could extract a list of fonts from that.
Found on web

TrueType & OpenType Fonts
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts
Adobe Type 1 Fonts
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Type 1 Installer\Type 1 Fonts

To list only truetype fonts you can use something like:
reg query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts"|findstr TrueType
If you want to see all nontruetype fonts use findstr on this way:
...|findstr -v TrueType

Output of those shell commands appears to display family font members:

Code: Select all

Arial (TrueType)                                                      : arial.ttf
Arial Black (TrueType)                                                : ariblk.ttf
Arial Bold (TrueType)                                                 : arialbd.ttf
Arial Bold Italic (TrueType)                                          : arialbi.ttf
Arial Italic (TrueType)                                               : ariali.ttf
Bahnschrift (TrueType)                                                : bahnschrift.ttf
Calibri (TrueType)                                                    : calibri.ttf
Calibri Bold (TrueType)                                               : calibrib.ttf
Calibri Bold Italic (TrueType)                                        : calibriz.ttf
Calibri Italic (TrueType)                                             : calibrii.ttf
Calibri Light (TrueType)                                              : calibril.ttf
Calibri Light Italic (TrueType)   

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I just don't want the Welcome tread to get turned into another one of our threads that go way off topic

+1 on this.
Also, is it possible to pin this part of a running history somewhere?

I think it's important to have a go-to place which is on the front page. Perhaps "The story so far..." or something like that.

Good idea. I copied that into its own thread in 'OpenXTalk Progress' and made it Sticky/Announce.
That way we can just keep updating that post whenever major new significant events happen.

https://openxtalk.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1131