Over the last year, we've learned a lot about how client side fonts change the X environment. The initial focus was to simplify the Render extension protocol and avoid future problems by eliminating font information. This has been admirably achieved -- we've got lots of possible directions and no sign that the protocol will limit future font capabilities.
However, we've also discovered that client side fonts have significant additional advantages. The ability to draw anti-aliased text is a nice feature, but has become overshadowed at the application level by the tremendous power of full access to the font file data. Xft attempts to provide symmetrical access to server-side and client-side fonts; this is hampering application use of client-side fonts while not helping anything -- existing applications already know how to deal with server-side fonts and new applications want to take advantage of the available font information. Server-side fonts were added to Xft to support legacy X servers without the Render extension. I suggest that instead of using server-side fonts, Xft should rasterize glyphs with FreeType and draw with the Render extension where available and using the core protocol for legacy servers without Render support. I'd implement both AA and non-AA paths, making this perform reasonably well over networks while also providing extended capabilities for servers not able to move to the Render extension. I've done client-side non-AA text in the core protocol in the past and have found it acceptable, even over relatively low speed links (128K ISDN). Please write with concerns or comments. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
