Around 22 o'clock on Feb 20, Joseph Koshy wrote:
> Font technologies like OpenType allow for the font renderer to do > sophisticated transformations on the glyphs being rendered, including > glyph substitution, glyph repositioning (e.g:- kerning) and the like. > > If this rendering were to be done by an X server, how would a client > map a screen coordinate back to an underlying location in the text > that it is handling? The solution is not to have the X server do layout -- it's not possible on that side of the wire as, in general, it requires arbitrary amounts of the character data to do the layout. > It seems to me that, by the current definition of the X protocol, the > client has to do complex text rendering, meaning that full support for > OpenType HAS to reside on the client side, and not on the server side. That's correct. Systems like Pango are doing just that, accessing the OpenType tables directly from the font file and rendering text using the Xft library. Server side fonts are a bad idea, and sophisticated text layout of this nature is one of the more significant features that simply cannot be grafted onto server-side font support. The new version of the Xft library provides client-side font support for all X servers, making it possible for applications to take advantage of the capabilities client-side fonts bring to every desktop. The Render extension provides the infrastructure to do this with performance equivalent to server-side fonts. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
