On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Philip S Tellis wrote:
> The whole concept of font servers actually came about so because people
> would have a single server with xfs and a whole load of X clients. The
> X servers would run remotely and contact the xfs for its fonts,
> providing only display drivers. Back then, the X server didn't have
> font drivers built in.
>
> Today, X servers have font drivers (including the freetype library)
> compiled in and no longer require a font server. Furthermore, how many
> people do you know who actually do what I described above?
I think some more clarification is required here. Earlier X Window
systems (XFree86 3.x and earlier) had capabilities to handle the fonts
itself. X servers could act as font server also. In other words, it
could render the fonts itself without any other font server. Then
came font servers (xfs-tt and xfs-ft) with TrueType capability
only. Both of these font servers can be seen as an additional element
in X server's font path. xfs-ft is using FreeType library which
is font renderer of TrueType (and now OpenType) fonts. Then, as Philip
already explained, this freetype renderer was added as font module in
X Window system and thus by enabling X server to handle TrueType
fonts itself in addition of separate font server.
Since then people started thinking about removing load from X server
and provide font support through font servers. So actually current
trend is towards running font server to render fonts instead of using
X server. There are certain advantages also for using font
servers. Font server is a separate program so while adding new
feature, say hinting support, there is no need to upgrade X window
system. Now a days, xfs-ft supports other file formats also, e.g.,
Type1, BDF, PCF, etc.
Even today we can rely on either X server or X font server to render
fonts. My experience says that font server can render the fonts more
smoothly than X server because font libraries available in X window
system are not upgraded as quickly as font servers. Also these font
modules are now coming as loadable modules in X servers. So one can
easily choose whether to load a module and use font rendering
capability of X server or not. Also if you specify any font path
before xfs's path (unix/:7100) in your XF86Config file then it will
use font module in X server instead of xfs. This way also you can
select between X server and xfs to render a particular type of fonts.
- Keyur
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