On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 04:09:59PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote: > On Feb 28, 2005, at 3:34 PM, Mario Klebsch wrote: > >>I've built GTK+ on Solaris 8 / SPARC, it does work but will require > >>some thought since the Solaris Xserver doesn't support the same set of > >>extensions that the Xfree86 server does (Xrender). So you typically > >>run into trouble building freetype and related stuff though. > > > >I must admit, that I do no tunderstand, why a basic GUI toolkit is > >required to be able to to TrueType and Type1 font processing. We are > >not building a word processor. > > Yes, it is ridiculous for GTK+ to *require* fancy font-handling > techniques for applications that do not require them. Doing TrueType > fonts and antialiasing for menu choice is just plain excessive. > > Especially when it means the application will only run under Linux.
Why do you say that? GTK+ application runs under a wide variety of operating systems. > I think the situation would be much better if GTK+ were able to be > built either with or without Pang/XFT/Xrender/etc, and just use X's > regular font system. That would cut the number of dependencies down to > something manageable, and it would restore portability. I disagree. What I believe is needed in the current situation related to fonts and X is not more options and ways to configure things, it's less options. I think what happened was that there was a need for better looking fonts under X and many different and incompatible libraries were developed to support this. Now it finally seems like we are at a point were things are converging around freetype2 and it's dependencies. Lets not try to go back and add more configuration options - it's hard enough to configure a working font system as it is and I wouldn' like to see applications that now requires me to tweak yet another aspect of the fonts installed on my box. -- Daniel Nilsson
