On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 11:19:12PM +0200, Felix Breuer wrote: > What became of the Xft drawing engine? Where can I get it? With what > version of ion does it work? > Is it going to be distributed with ion sometime in the future?
There's not even the slightest chance that it would be distributed with Ion2 -- Ion2 is "stable", and no new essential features will be added to it. As for Ion3, perhaps, depends on the quality of the code. However, there may be some changes to some aspects of the drawing engine interface, so I would not recommend trying to port it to Ion3 yet. Also, I would think that Xft has exactly the same problems as XDrawString16 wrt. unicode fonts (search the ML archives for some quite recent posting for discussion), and it would therefore perhaps be better to use Pango. But to make this efficient, some changes are needed in the drawing engine interface. (Pango breaks strings into multiple bloated linked lists before doing anything on them and I don't want this to happen on every single draw operation.) Whatever else happens, the default drawing engine will stick to just core Xlib -- I don't want the redundant glib dependency by default -- but if a Pango engine was provided, I could forget trying to support every single character on earth (which is now done with XFontSets that have serious problems with utf-8) in the default engine -- Tuomo
