Re: GDK_USE_XFT

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Sven Neumann <sven gimp org> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> I wonder if GDK_USE_XFT should be the default for GTK+-2.0.0.  IMO it
> would make a lot of sense since otherwise only few users will discover
> that they can have antialiased fonts this way. Or is it the default
> nowadays and I just haven't noticed ?

I don't think making it the default is a good idea:

 - We don't have quite the language coverage that we do for the core X
   backend. (No indic support in the Pango distribution yet.)
 - XFree86-4.1 and earlier have a fairly bad bug in Xft 
   that shows up as random crashes
 - The Xft backend is a bit more sensitive to configuration problems
   on the system.

It probably should be an XSETTING rather than an environment variable,
even though we can't turn it on on the fly. (Apps probably won't like
having the set of available fonts changing.) Something to look at doing
in a future version.

Regards,
                                        Owen