Re: GTK+-2.x planning

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Keith Packard <keithp keithp com> writes:   
> I suggest that Gtk+ provide an interface to parallel the current font/
> fontset APIs for client-side fonts.  I've done this and ported xchat with 
> only cosmetic modifications to the code.  The only issue is with locales 
> and character sets; Xft lives in a Unicode world, so Gtk+ may need to 
> provide some transcoding abilities.

Right, the XDrawString() sort of API is missing.

You just gave the reason why it isn't there though - it's broken for
i18n, and lazy developers will use it for things like XChat for no
good reason. ;-) XChat could easily use PangoLayout instead of being
broken, I don't see how it could possibly be that hard.

> I don't believe we need to preserve any Xlib/Xft abstractions -- there's 
> no reason to continue using core X fonts in any Gtk+ application, and 
> several good reasons to abandon them.

Can people use Xft with "old" (not really very old) X servers that
lack RENDER? If not, I don't think we can drop core X fonts yet.

We'd also need it to be simple to download and install Xft on a system
without having to get all of XFree, probably.

But yeah I'd love to go Xft-only as soon as it's remotely feasible.

Havoc