Re: gdkxft (or, take two on AA text for GTK 1.2.X).

[iain <iain ximian com>]

On Mon, 2001-09-03 at 02:08, Seth Nickell wrote:
> On 02 Sep 2001 07:42:18 -0700, Jim Gettys wrote:
> > Anyone play with this?  Seems to work without requiring source changes to
> > GTK.  AA text on the iPAQ beats the old stuff hands down, as you tend
> > to be looking at the screen from a smaller distance than usual, and
> > it is an LCD.
> > 
> > See:
> > http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~josh/gdkxft/
> > http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~josh/gdkxft/README
> > 
> > Or am I better off playing with the patches that are floating around?
> 
> It seems to work more smoothly than the patches, in general. Especially
> nice is that it doesn't not require recompilation.
> 
> I have shots of it in action at:
> 
> http://www.stanford.edu/~snickell/aa_shots/
> 
> It took me about ten minutes to setup...

Just the few things I've discovered:
Abiword crashes when you use a big font.
Gimp crashes when you use fonts
Gecko is messed up :)
The installer seems to rewrite your XftConfig file, which on my system
left every font name mapping to the same bold font, even wingdings.
Replacing it with the original XftConfig from Keith Packards webpage
worked fine.

In realfuncs.c the function lookup dlopens and dlcloses the gdk library
every time it's called, and it's called a lot. To speed things up, move
the lib variable to be static and only open it the first time. This
makes typing in Abiword and Evolution seem as fast as without the aa
stuff. I'd patch it, but it's a trivial 4 line change (if that), andit's
2:43am and I'm tired.

All I know is that Evolution looks positivly beautiful and I'm happy
with it.

iain