https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1753295
--- Comment #59 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mail...@laposte.net> --- To give some perspective: 1. end of 90's: X11 is reaching the end of its useful shelf life. Its codebase is badly outdated, its text rendering sucks loads 2. end of 90’s → 2003 attempts to shove modern text rendering in the X11 codebase, using freetype. It’s a failure. After several false starts (Xft…) decision to separate text rendering from X11, and keep freetype only for low-level rasterization. Other text handling functions will be moved to dedicated libs (starting with fontconfig for font selection). No one is willing to work on fixing the corresponding vestigial and known-broken code freetype and X11 side. The new architecture forms the basis of X12 (that you know under the Wayland name today). 3. 2003-2006. Free text handling projects (Gnome, KDE, X11, Open Office, Firefox, SIL, etc) have all been working separately on writing modern text layouting libs, starting with forks of the previous in-freetype attempts. They are all hitting the same problems, fixing the same bugs, and OpenType keeps adding new twists. They’re sick to death of this situation. They decide to convey a conference to try to find a solution. That’s the first text layout summit. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout/ 4. 2006. Participants agree to drop their separate dev attempts and consolidate on a single lib. They choose to base it on the Harfbuzz GTK component. Harfbuzz is an OpenType-only lib (Harfbuzz is the transliteration of OpenType in Persian). 5. 2006-2016 To mark harfbuzz is now a common codebase, it’s renamed harfbuzz-ng. Everyone from KDE to Open Office contribute its layouting fixes to this lib. Legacy text codebases get rewritten to use harfbuzz-ng (in Gnome, KDE, Firefox, *Office, OpenKDK, TEX engines, browsers, I probably forget some of them). If you look at who is doing the work, you find the same small number of people contributing in all projects. The process is not without bumps: Oracle gives Open Office to Apache, and Apache starts by trying to rip anything free software-ish from the codebase. Google poaches lots of free desktop text devs to work on its own text rendering stack (Chrome…). At some time Text Layout summits peter out, because consensus has been achieved and the only remaining part is implementation work. 6. 2016. Libre Office completes its migration to harfbuzz-ng in the 5.3 release. That results in the dropping of legacy font format support. Bitmap and PS1 users grumble, but they have no alternative solution to propose, and the harfbuzz-ng migration fixes in one go years of text layouting problems. 7. 2019. Pango completes its migration to harfbuzz-ng. Same result. That’s what prompted this issue ticket. So, no use complaining converting font formats is work and OpenType is not mainstream yet. OpenType is getting mainstream NOW. That’s why it's curtain time for other font formats in all the apps that matter (matter because they have an active maintenance team, which has been doing the harfbuzz-ng migration work in the past decade). -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ fonts-bugs mailing list -- fonts-bugs@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to fonts-bugs-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/fonts-bugs@lists.fedoraproject.org
