Re: gtk-font-hack patch

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

john fremlin vii <vii@altern.org> writes:

> This patch adds font smoothing to the GDK. I would appreciate
> feedback!
> 
> I've attached a patch against 1.2.6. 
> 
> http://altern.org/vii/programs/linux/gtk-font-hack/
> 
> Now no longer core dumps on me (so I'm calling it beta).
> 
> Problems now:
> 
> x For some reason fonts are not smudged in gnome-o-terminal
>   programs (e.g. gnome-terminal, gnome-genius, gnome-chess), though 
>   the size allowed for them is halved. I guess this gadget bypasses 
>   the GDK in some way (??).
> x The right part of GHex's left display window with the hex
>   in it is missing inexplicably.
> x When the GTK draws the same text twice in the same place
>   without clearing, the edges are darkened. I guess this is done in
>   too many places to fix quickly.

It's cool you are working on this. 

I don't think we actually are that interested in incorporating such a
patch into GDK at the current time. Pango
(http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/pango/) will include a pretty
general framework for font handling - at that point it will be easy to
hook GDK into a client-side font rendering library like FreeType or
T1Lib. Which is going to be a lot more efficient then rendering the
fonts on the server at a large size, and then pulling them back to the
client side and scaling them down.

Also, there is some work being done to add anti-aliasing to XFree86
both as a quick hack, and as part of a reworking of the rendering
model to include alpha. So, long term, we can look forward to having
that there to work with.

Regards,
                                                Owen