I saw that on the mirror, but was not sure what the difference between vanilla
and xft are. What does xft stand for?
I'm not sure what it stands for, but it's designed to fix the mess
currently associated with X and fonts. Basically, fonts are normally
stored on the font server (the display part of X), which presents major
headaches for programmers and application designers. One such problem
is, since the server is in charge of displaying its own fonts there is
little opportunity for the client (the executing, cpu-using part of X), to
control how the font should be rendered.
Xft is a library for using fonts on the client-side. It uses fontconfig
for accessing fonts, freetype for rasterizing fonts, and the X Render
extension (if available) for rendering the fonts.
fontconfig is a system setup for storing and retrieving fonts.
Basically, you drop a new font into a preconfigured directory and then
the font is installed and usable. Also, applications that use
fontconfig, rather than having to specify big, nasty, X font
descriptions (those long things with lots of hyphens and asterisks), can
just ask for "Courier" or "Times". And fontconfig will follow certain
configurable heuristics for choosing the best font to reply with. Note
it has no dependency on X, so it is potentially useful for more than
just X applications (for instance, printer drivers, or console-mode
documentation packages).
freetype is a libary that can open font files (truetype, opentype, and
other lesser formats) and convert fonts from their
resolution-independent mathematical representations (as stored in the
files) to pixels. This process is called rasterization.
X Render extension is an add-on for XFree86 (and the latest version of
sun microsystem's version of X), which provides functions for
compositing onscreen images. This is particularly useful for making
fonts look smooth, because font's are smoothed by bluring certain rough
edges with the font's background. This process is called rasterization.
So there is a lot of really cool technology behind xft, but the only
thing you will probably notice is that it gives you smooth looking fonts.
--Ray
