I have come to the part of Cello where I need to start dealing with text and fonts. Detailed information about glyphs, metrics, kerning pairs, glyph outlines etc. all need to be known in order to generate the final output file.
The Windows (MFC) version of Cello uses the D-Type font engine (scalar). Looking at D-Type it looks pretty good, and it is available for OSX. I do not, however, plan to use it - instead I will use CoreText. Core Text is Apple's new type technology. Released in Leopard (10.5) it replaces ATSUI which has entered the holding area that technologies enter before deprecation. I plan to use CoreText for a variety of reasons - the main one is that it integrates directly and naturally with CoreGraphics (Quartz) Apple's graphics technology. I plan to do all the drawing with CoreGraphics so using the complementary companion technology makes sense. I have experience of mashing and melding disperate graphics engines and font scalars and the like together and it is a whole lot easier to have a single imaging model.
The CoreText API looks clean and easy to understand. It is built on top of standard Core Foundation objects like CFDictionary as well as introducing it's own new types like CTFont. As with other Core Foundation technologies it toll-free-bridges onto equivalent cocoa NS types. This will make the inevitable protrusions into Cocoa for the UI straightforward to deal with.
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