On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 10:52:46AM -0400, Phillip Susi wrote: > 3) Performance suffers. The X server is in the best position to render > fonts using any hardware acceleration provided by the video card, and > allows for those fonts to be shared by all applications, reducing > duplication and waste. Also for remote X sessions, you want the fonts > rendered on the server so much less data needs exchanged between the > client and server.
Measurements have shown that over pretty much any sort of common network, latency is more of a problem than bandwidth. Server-side fonts require multiple round-trips between the server and the client for rendering, whereas client-side fonts only require the initial display. Performance-wise, we have the XRender extension for precisely this sort of situation. > Other than the fact that the client side implementations have advanced > beyond the X server ones in recent times, is there any advantage to > client side font rendering over server side? If not, then we should > push to bring the client side advancements back into the server where > font rendering belongs. Font choice and layout is hard, and doesn't become any easier just because you've moved that code to a binary that runs as root. Nobody is going to argue in favour of putting a layout engine like Pango in the X server, and most of the rest of the stack is similarly well outside the scope of the X server. The client-side font revolution happened 5 years ago, and we've ended up with massively improved font support as a result. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss