On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 12:04 AM, Fernando Lemos <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 1:00 PM, DR <[email protected]> wrote: >> Seriously, Why no xft support? >> I could found a lot of use cases for xft, like: >> Outline fonts, hinting, sub-pixel font rendering which would be nice >> for lcd display, support font alias so I could use different font for >> different language, make font config easier, and many more. >> >> So could anyone give me a reason why you decided not to include xft support? > > I guess you reached that conclusion based on item 9 in the i3 home > page. Michael could probably give you specific reasons, but most > likely he simply likes his X core fonts and wouldn't want the burdern > of supporting different rendering engines. Now I've talked to Michael > about this in the past, and I think we might be able to support modern > rendering engines soon-ish. > > Some time ago we made changes to the i3 source that moved font > rendering to libi3. Right now we can only render X core fonts with > this font rendering API, but I maintain a Pango backend (I can post > the patches somewhere if you want to give it a shot). When and if this > backend is merged, we'll have "xft" fonts in i3. > > The major reason why this backend hasn't been merged so far is that i3 > uses xcb, not Xlib (well, except for a few things) and we use Pango to > render on top of a Cairo surface connected to a xcb pixmap. Cairo > doesn't officially support xcb, so not all distros ship xcb support > for Cairo (Debian does, Arch doesn't). This is probably gonna change > when the next release of Cairo is out (1.12, if I'm not mistaken). By > then we can consider integrating this backend or not. > > To clarify, Pango support would automagically bring us (in i3, i3bar > and other tools): > > * UTF-8 support > * Support for right-to-left languages > * Smooth fonts, with hinting, sub-pixel rendering, etc., as you mentioned > > Pango support would *not* bring us "outlines", though. Although it > could perhaps be implemented with Pango, this would require theming > changes, and that would be a separate discussion. > > Regards,
Thank you for your reply. I'm glad someone is currently working on it. If you send me the patch, I'd be glad to test it.
