On Wed, May 05, 1999 at 11:10:54AM +0200, Drazen Kacar wrote:
> > > Are you using the gtk text widget or are you using gtk canvas
> > > widget?
> >
> > Neither one. AbiWord is written using a very cross-platform design.
>
> Do you intend (at some point) to implement anti-aliasing of text on
> Unix? I've seen only one program which does this (gfont) and it does it
> by using freetype lib for true type fonts and t1lib for Type 1 fonts.
> t1lib can't work if the font are not local, but since printing also
> needs local fonts, I suppose it's not a big restriction.
Way back, like last year, I hacked our Unix graphics side to use
t1lib for fonts. It was slow even without anti-aliasing. Very slow.
Very, very slow. ;)
I talked a bit with the author of the library, and his opinion was
basically "client-side fonts will always be really slow when you're
doing as much drawing as a word processor does." X just can't
push pixels between the client and the server that fast. Normal
Type 1 scaling and rasterization occurs in the server, and things
are pretty snappy.
X also caches fonts for you, on the server side, which I wasn't
originally doing with t1lib. But plotting one character was
just really slow.
I think FreeType is the TrueType library which USED to be GPLed,
but is now some mutant incompatible custom BSD license.
--
Shaw Terwilliger
