Around 8 o'clock on Nov 19, Brian Stell wrote:
> An important feature in browsers is that the page display > begins *before* the entire page is received. This is important > for systems with phone modems where it can take a while for > larger documents. Which is precisely why the Xft mechanism is designed to be incremental. Applications provide a pattern to Xft and then slowly increase the set of glyphs needed to present the entire document. There is no way to know the complete set of glyphs needed to display any document, so the Xft mechanism provides for a list of fonts which can be dynamically adjusted as additional glyphs are discovered in the document. The hardest part of this is to make the selection of fonts for a particular section of the document not depend on the order in which glyph requirements are presented to the library. Xft does this by listing all of the fonts in the system in according to how closely they match the original pattern. Applications can walk this list to find the closest matching font which contains the necessary glyphs. Precisely how they select fonts is not specified by Xft; presumably they'll want to try to find fonts which can display relatively large contiguous sections of text to avoid the ransom note effect. As Xft has no access to the underlying application data, there's no way it can make reasonable choices. Note that this list is only a list of font *names*, not the fonts themselves -- placing the Unicode coverage in the name allows the application to delay opening each font until it decides to present some glyphs with it. Suggestions on precise interfaces are welcome; I'm still pondering the structure of this code. [EMAIL PROTECTED] XFree86 Core Team SuSE, Inc. _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
