I had some general questions about xft:
How does the server handle caching identical glyph masks? I dont think it can memcmp them, so does it compare fully qualified font names? if so, it would be taking the risk that one client has a differently rendered result for that font- and hence the bitmaps from one would show up on the other's display. (a rogue x client could mess up all font displays?) When rasterizing a rotated glyph, is it efficient to specify different rotations for individual glyphs within a single font? It seems that the rotation is part of the font name, but hopefully the font file is not wholly reparsed for every different angle a glyph is rendered at. (This may came into play when rendering text along curves, the rasterization and font parsing should involve no more work for printing ABCDE across a bezier curve than in a straight line (just extra calls to FT_Set_Transform )) It would be nice to have a more convientient way to rasterize rotated strings, perhaps an XftDrawString that took a transformation matrix (applied to all glyphs in string, autogenerating proper strikes, etc ). The last question is: if every app is doing rasterization, its seems that alot of duplicate work is being done. A daemon with a version of Xft font manager could be running which did the rasterizition and caching. Imagine having 20 windows open and the titlebar font is exotic kanjis that each app is rasterizing them separatly, Instead they could be rasterized once and given to the apps by read only shared memory or some such thing. Of course the apps that want to load their own fonts would still need the current Xft backend, but the vast majority could link to a simplfied Xft that gets its strikes from an Xftd. (extra long term: a line protocol makes xftd a client oriented xfs replacer, each client relaying the strikes to the XServer- ultimatly maybe the X server could also use the Xftd, and the clients configured to use the Xserver as their Xftd (perhaps right via the existing x connection, an argument for making the Xftd line protocol xprotocol compatible)) thx, hopefully none of these are faq. P.S. I can't wait for randr, it would be very nice to start up a game of e.j. starcraft in fullsccreen 640x480 8bpp while still having my desktop apps running 1172x824 32bpp in the background... _______________________________________________ Render mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/render
