Keith Packard wrote:
> ...
> I believe that iso10646-1 encoded fonts can only be effectively used from
> the client side; a database can accompany the fonts themselves allowing
> applications to perform font selection based on available glyphs. I hope
> to finish work on Xft in the near future which demonstrates how this works.
>
> Any way of making iso10646-1 fonts work reasonably will require a change
> in the X server. As any such change takes essentially the same amount of
> time to propogate to all X servers, we might as well use the one which
> solves a host of other issues at the same time (Render).
In the long run moving to TrueType fonts (FreeType2) and
server-side anti-aliasing (Render) is a great way to go as it
gives fast performance and good looking fonts.
Xft is clearly the 1st choice (and perhaps only choice) most
single language apps should look at to make this transition.
Apps that server a single language have/will-continue to use
legacy encodings and iso10646 fonts with satisfactory results.
This works because apps default to a usable font or the users
finds one by guessing. Once one font is found no more work is
needed.
Xft already handles single language apps so it is probably time
to deprecate the X font APIs in favor of Xft. There is no reason
existing apps should not be allowed to continue using the old
APIs but but we should strongly encourage newer single language
apps to begin moving to Xft. For maximum system coverage we
should probably recommend that these apps static link Xft and
FreeType2 if they want to work on older systems.
Multilingual apps have additional needs. Since there is no font
that covers all of Unicode, multilingual Unicode apps will need
to logically combine fonts to display all the possible
characters in Unicode. For these kinds of apps using 10646
encoding via the XLFD is a sub optimal choice as there is no
efficient way to find out which characters are contained in
these fonts. Keith is working on the "which glyphs are
available" problem and when it is available multilingual apps
can benefit from it.
Once there is an efficient way to find out which glyphs are
available, multilingual apps will need code to combine these
fonts in to a "multilingual" font (Pango) and do complex text
layout (Pango?, FTLayout?, ICU?).
--
Brian Stell
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