Hi, On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 1:00 PM, DR <drdarkra...@gmail.com> wrote: > Seriously, Why no xft support? > I could found a lot of use cases for xft, like: > Outline fonts, hinting, sub-pixel font rendering which would be nice > for lcd display, support font alias so I could use different font for > different language, make font config easier, and many more. > > So could anyone give me a reason why you decided not to include xft support?
I guess you reached that conclusion based on item 9 in the i3 home page. Michael could probably give you specific reasons, but most likely he simply likes his X core fonts and wouldn't want the burdern of supporting different rendering engines. Now I've talked to Michael about this in the past, and I think we might be able to support modern rendering engines soon-ish. Some time ago we made changes to the i3 source that moved font rendering to libi3. Right now we can only render X core fonts with this font rendering API, but I maintain a Pango backend (I can post the patches somewhere if you want to give it a shot). When and if this backend is merged, we'll have "xft" fonts in i3. The major reason why this backend hasn't been merged so far is that i3 uses xcb, not Xlib (well, except for a few things) and we use Pango to render on top of a Cairo surface connected to a xcb pixmap. Cairo doesn't officially support xcb, so not all distros ship xcb support for Cairo (Debian does, Arch doesn't). This is probably gonna change when the next release of Cairo is out (1.12, if I'm not mistaken). By then we can consider integrating this backend or not. To clarify, Pango support would automagically bring us (in i3, i3bar and other tools): * UTF-8 support * Support for right-to-left languages * Smooth fonts, with hinting, sub-pixel rendering, etc., as you mentioned Pango support would *not* bring us "outlines", though. Although it could perhaps be implemented with Pango, this would require theming changes, and that would be a separate discussion. Regards,
