Around 16 o'clock on Feb 26, Arun Sharma wrote:
> Is there a plan to build a client side font rendering library that's > capable of supporting complex scripts and that will be a part of the > base X distribution ? I really think that font rendering framework > is basic functionality that should be a part of X, without which it'd > be incomplete. We have several examples of how such functionality might work; it's clear that Pango and ST have much in common -- they both "own" your text and perform paragraph level layout. I don't believe they've answered all of the questions about document layout and flow; I suspect there are lots of interesting problems still to be solved here. When, in the past, we've promoted a standard within the X community before it was ready, we've seen stagnation of other efforts. That means I'll be unwilling to help champion a standard solution until I see rough concensus around one particular implementation. I'm not quite sure why you believe there should be only one implementation though; the two fundemental toolkits (Qt3, Gtk+ 2.0) both support sophisticated text layout, and we've a new system (ST) which may well provide a interface for applications using non-standard toolkits. > Also, it'd be helpful to have a single API, for GUI toolkits such as gtk > and Qt to use to handle the fonts, that abstracts out the implementation > details (client side vs server side) from the toolkit. That we have today -- Xft is the fundemental font API used by Qt3, Gtk+ 2.0, Mozilla (eventually) and I've got ports for fltk, Tcl/Tk and a few other applications. The original Xft implementation tried to provide an abstraction to hide the differences between server-side and client-side fonts, using the core X font management. It was a disaster -- applications really need the capabilities that only client-side fonts can provide, like access to the GSUB/GPOS tables, access to outlines for conversion to Type42/Type3 and inclusion in Postscript output, font selection based on Unicode coverage and language group information found in the TrueType OS/2 tables. The list goes on. Attempting to provide *all* of this information server-side means that the protocol will never be finished, making it very difficult for applications to ever take advantage of most of the capabilities of the system. Xft now provides a uniform client-side font API, performance on legacy X servers is adequate if not stunning. Performance with the Render extension is not limited by the wire in most environments, and will increase as acceleration becomes standard for X servers. I believe the ST API can be easily ported to Xft so that it too can join the remaining X environments and standardize on a common API and configuration mechanism. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
