comments from xfsft author

[nelson media mit edu (Nelson Minar)]

I contacted the author of xfsft and asked him what he thought about
the recent discussion going around about truetype support in Gnome.
He knows a hell of a lot more about X internals than I do :-)
Here's his reply.

------- start of forwarded message (RFC 934 encapsulation) -------
From: Juliusz Chroboczek <jec@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
To: Nelson Minar <nelson@media.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: truetype fonts and X
Date: 25 Aug 1998 08:26:24 +0100

Hello,

I'm very pleased that you should like xfsft.  It's always nice to have
people appreciate your work.

NM> Gnome, a new/free GUI system for X

No need to explain.  We're all following the work of you folks with
attention, and we're really looking forward to the day when we'll be
able to recommend it to various people.  (By the way, here's a feature
request: allow me to use gwm with Gnome.  And allow me to use Gnome
apps without all of Gnome installed.)

NM> Using xfsft (or later, built in support for TrueType) to include
NM> TrueType fonts in Gnome. This comes basically for free, but
NM> there's some hope that with a proper set of TrueType fonts one
NM> could make a font selector that's more sane

Do you mean that you need some sort of font identification that goes
beyond what XLFD provides you with?

Feel free to specify any information you'd like xfsft to provide in
font properties; I've done my best to provide anything that sounded
reasonable and that wasn't too different from what the XLFD spec says
(see the function FreeTypeAddProperties in `ftfunc.c'), but I'm sure
that more could be done.

Note by the way that using font properties is very slow at the moment,
as the backend computes all glyph metrics on GetInfo (this is better
than what the Speedo and Type 1 backends do, though, as they rasterise
all the glyphs).  This was done to satisfy the (mistaken) expectation
of many X apps and toolkits to have font metrics coincide with ink
metrics, and to cater for fonts that provide broken metrics
information (that will typically not work on systems that are too
smart about fonts, such as OS/2), but will be user-selectable in a
next version (no date at the current time, I'm busy).

NM> Using some sort of extensions (either client side or server side)
NM> to support rendering anti-aliased text into X windows.

Simple-minded client side would kill performance more than you'd
expect (I know of people who've tried it).  You could try to use
server-side pixmaps to cache glyphs, but that would make Gnome
unusable on low-end X terminals.

Server side: I happen to know that there are people who have been
playing with just such an extension; they've found it to be more
complicated than they expected, due to the existence of PseudoColor.
The work is currently on hold due to more urgent tasks within XFree86.
So don't hold your breath, but there's hope.  (And feel free to join
the XFree86 project if you want to work on it.)

NM> You might want to check out the archives of discussion at
NM> http://www.gnome.org/ as well.

Thanks, will do.  And feel free to forward this message if you find it
suitable.

Sincerely,

                                        J. Chroboczek
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