On Sat, 8 Oct 2011 15:06:25 +0200 Aurélien Aptel <aurelien.ap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The only previous > experience I had in this was SDL_ttf on one of my pet project, which > is ridiculously simple and straightforward to use albeit not very fast > I guess. It's meant for games, it may well be as quick as they can make it. That said, urxvt can be depressingly slow with ttf fonts. I switched to Aterm on my old PDA since the urxvt build was ttf-only. > st will never work as well as the next emulator as long as I limit > myself to X11 core libs. It's just too much work and more importantly > it will end up littered with boiler plate code and workaround of X11 > apis. I won't do it. st has already too much of it. So if anyone has > preference towards another font system, let's talk about it. Plan 9's has probably been brought up before; I'm just mentioning it for completeness. The font format is simple, the means of drawing it is also -- it's just image blitting, and it's loose enough that fonts can be antialiased, and even subpixel enhanced. There is a tool for converting from from ttf too. I'm not sure what reasons there might be to prefer it over SD_ttf. The conversion from vector to bitmap happens only once instead of caching the bitmap data every time the program is run (which is what I suppose SDL_ttf does). A possibly better reason is that Plan 9 fonts are readily hackable. The bitmap files are _subfonts_, the actual font files are textual lists of subfonts covering various ranges of chars.