Around 10 o'clock on Feb 26, Arun Sharma wrote:
> The general development direction in the XFree86 tree is towards client side > fonts, although new efforts like ST are favoring server side font > handling. Server side font handling for sophisticated layout requires a new X extension. Client side fonts can be done with the existing core graphics primitives, although performance is quite a bit slower. The Render extension permits many different client side implementations to share the same X extension; server side fonts require a new extension for each implmentation. > One of the primary justifications for client side fonts is the slow pace of > X server development and the difficulty of supporting legacy X servers Performance is another important reason for client-side fonts. We know what the network behaviour of that solution will be; server side layout is an unproven technique with potentially large numbers of round trips required. > X protocol was designed at a time when the distinction between > characters and glyphs was not very important (hence the language > in the protocol and the man pages) Not just 'not very important'; there was no distinction. Character encodings were assumed to be the same as glyph encodings; the notion that text would come in an encoding that wasn't suitable for direct display had not been heard of yet. As a result, the core protocol is incapable of supporting any kind of sophisticated character->glyph mapping. The question is not whether the core text code can be used for sophisticated layout, the only question is what system should replace it. Client side text has the advantage of a uniform mechanism and interface for all X servers; the extension provides a performance advantage, but text is more than usable even on legacy X servers. On the local machine, I can draw some 13000 24 pixel anti-aliased glyphs per second and nearly 90000 'aliased' glyphs per second. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
