All, I've been thinking about the fonts stuff and I think I've got an interesting idea about the font servers.
Normally a font server runs as a TCP/IP server and the X server connects to it as a client. This is not very convenient because it makes running the running of a font server by a random user not very easy. Also if it happens that the font server crashes or has not been started, the X server tends to freese. As far as I understand, the Render extension allows an application to provide bitmaps to be used as fonts. Hovewer these fonts are used only by one application and can't be shared with the others. So a logical next step seems to be an "X-client font server". The idea is that the font server connects to the X server as a client, and then does a call indicating that it's a font server. At this point the X server adds this new font server to its font path (I guess, either at the beginning or the end, depending on the options) and uses it as a normal font server, with fonts available to all the X clients. If this connection drops, the X server will silently remove this font server from its font path and go on. This makes such things as starting a personal font server from .profile easy and reliable. Well, the catch is that I don't know enough about the internal workings of the X server and the font protocol to actually implement it (nor really have time) :-( -SB _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
