On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 08:10:04PM +0100, Lionel Ulmer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Now that XFree 4.0.2 is out, the new Render extension (more details here :
> http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/) will be available on many (most ?)
> Linux desktops.
>
> What could be interesting for Wine is resumed in the X release note :
>
> "Unlike the core protocol, Render provides no font support for applications,
> rather it allows applications to upload glyphs for display on the screen.
> This allows the client greater control over text rendering and complete
> access to the available font information while still providing hardware
> acceleration."
>
> This could solve many problems Wine has for font displaying. I know this
> argument (ie client-side font rendering) was already discussed at length
> (and rejected due to the 'remote displaying' argument). But now that the
> possibility of client-side glyphs is in the X protocol itself, we could have
> the argu^H^H^H^Hdiscussion again :-)
Indeed, I've been looking into this. I don't think we ever rejected
client-side rendering, it was just noted that there will be a slight
hit for remote displays ['slight' because the server will cache the
rendered glyph so it's not that bad]. In fact we were probably going
to go down the client-side rendering route anyway, XRender now just
makes it rather easier.
In the next few weeks I'll try to get a Wine internal font-engine api
evolved, once we have that we can get a XRender module into the
x11drv.
Huw.
