Re: libXrender - documentation?
In 49809721.2020...@sun.com Alan Coopersmith alan.coopersm...@sun.com writes: Charles Lindsey wrote: RENDER extension not supported by server Aaaarhh! Render support on Solaris 10 depends on which X server drivers you use. On x86/x64 hardware, use the Xorg server (which is default in Solaris 10 and later on that hardware) and Render should be supported on almost all hardware/drivers. On SPARC hardware, the drivers for the Xsun server only support render on some graphics cards, and some require patches from SunSolve and/or adding +xrender to the Xsun command line options to enable it. Well I wish Sun would admit to it somewhere on their Website. I am using a SPARC Ultra-2 with the Creator Graphics board inside it, and the Jan. 06 release of Solaris 10. Can you say whether that should work? Or whether installing a later release would help (sadly, Sun no longer provide even browsable access to their patches). As to the +render flag, I have called 'strings' on Xsun, and no string containing render within it, so I doubt my version supports that. Is the Xsun source available someplace? (no trace of it on Opensolaris.org). -- Charles H. Lindsey -At Home, doing my own thing Tel: +44 161 436 6131Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: c...@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5 ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
In 871vupgnte@opera.com Eirik Byrkjeflot Anonsen ei...@opera.com writes: Clemens Eisserer linuxhi...@gmail.com writes: [...] For sure the Opera/QT combination is not doing anything like that - all the calls that actually pass glyphs to/from the server use good ol' Xlib. Though there is evidence that xft does use Xrender elsewhere in its workings. I don't know about opera, but im am pretty (99,5%) sure QT uses Render - now if Opera uses QT's graphic context for drawing it will implicitly use it. The text handling in Qt 2 was abysmal (in particular the font switching), so we (opera) implemented our own. I don't think we've changed it much since then. I believe our implementation uses xft and classic x fonts directly. Well, since my copy of Opera has QT bundled inside it, I cannot tell which is actually making the xft calls. But for sure, every time the cursor blinks in a mail-editing window, Opera/QT (whichever) calls XftDrawString16 on every word in the whole window, just on the offchance that words happens to overlap the cursor area. And if libxft is doing its own antialiassing (see my reply to Clemens regarding Solaris-10), the resultant cpu usage hogs 100% (and more if it could) of the processor. Which is plain silly (and I shall be moaning to you in opera.os.solaris about it once I have established exactly why Sun have messed it up :-( ). -- Charles H. Lindsey -At Home, doing my own thing Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: c...@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5 ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
In 194f62550901261140q12d1ed46k9075ebcc83dea...@mail.gmail.com Clemens Eisserer linuxhi...@gmail.com writes: I can't see any such calls of XRender* functions in the bits of xft that I have been looking at (notably in xftcore.c). Because xft deals with Glyphs, and for performance/bandwith resons glyphs are handled in a special manner. That was what I ment with (using the XRender*Glyphs functions). xftglyphs: XRenderAddGlyphs xftrender: XRenderCompositeText... OK, since you wrote that I have been poking around in the xft source, and the situation seems to be as follows: Libxft contains two modules (xftcore and xftrender). One does antialiassing client-side (with much consumption of cpu resources, some of it unnecessarily) and the other does it client side by calling XRenderCompositeText16 and friends (and I don't know what goes on behind those calls, because of lack of documentation thereof :-) ). To decide which to use, libxft first calls XRenderQueryExtension to see it the server is willing, and then calls XRenderFindVisualFormat to see whether the visual is suitable, and then calls XRenderFindFormat to see whether the particular font is capable. If any of those fails, it falls back to xftcore. Now I am using Solaris-10 as my operating system, and libXrender and libxft come bundled with it, and its documentation proudly proclaims This feature [the XRender Extension] is included in the Solaris 10 3/05 release (and it was actually in Solaris-9 before that). So I poked around using truss and the Debug facility in libxft, and discovered that the Opera/QT/Solaris combination always took the xftcore route. Finally, in desperation, I tried 'xdpyinfo -ext RENDER' and it told me: RENDER extension not supported by server Aaaarhh! So it is evidently a SUN problem, and I shall pursue it in that quarter. In the meantime, I apologise for impugning the ability of libxft to do antialiassing properly when presented with the proper environment. However as far as I know xft already has a XRender aware backend (using the XRender*Glyphs functions), as well as legacy support for pre-xrender servers. Yes, I can now see that is the case. But who is actually responsible for the development/maintenance of xft? For sure they do not seem to hang around on this list, though I gather they are within the overall Xorg structure somewhere. XFT is more or less a sample implementation, and as far as I know its not used a lot. Well, apart from QT (possibly older versions), it is certainly used by Adobe in the freely available 'acroread', and I think that would count as a lot. -- Charles H. Lindsey -At Home, doing my own thing Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: c...@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5 ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
Charles Lindsey wrote: Now I am using Solaris-10 as my operating system, and libXrender and libxft come bundled with it, and its documentation proudly proclaims This feature [the XRender Extension] is included in the Solaris 10 3/05 release (and it was actually in Solaris-9 before that). So I poked around using truss and the Debug facility in libxft, and discovered that the Opera/QT/Solaris combination always took the xftcore route. Finally, in desperation, I tried 'xdpyinfo -ext RENDER' and it told me: RENDER extension not supported by server Aaaarhh! Render support on Solaris 10 depends on which X server drivers you use. On x86/x64 hardware, use the Xorg server (which is default in Solaris 10 and later on that hardware) and Render should be supported on almost all hardware/drivers. On SPARC hardware, the drivers for the Xsun server only support render on some graphics cards, and some require patches from SunSolve and/or adding +xrender to the Xsun command line options to enable it. -- -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersm...@sun.com Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
Clemens Eisserer linuxhi...@gmail.com writes: [...] For sure the Opera/QT combination is not doing anything like that - all the calls that actually pass glyphs to/from the server use good ol' Xlib. Though there is evidence that xft does use Xrender elsewhere in its workings. I don't know about opera, but im am pretty (99,5%) sure QT uses Render - now if Opera uses QT's graphic context for drawing it will implicitly use it. The text handling in Qt 2 was abysmal (in particular the font switching), so we (opera) implemented our own. I don't think we've changed it much since then. I believe our implementation uses xft and classic x fonts directly. eirik ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 20:40 +0100, Clemens Eisserer wrote: But who is actually responsible for the development/maintenance of xft? For sure they do not seem to hang around on this list, though I gather they are within the overall Xorg structure somewhere. XFT is more or less a sample implementation, and as far as I know its not used a lot. As far as I know QT does its own glyph handling, so does GTK with pango. According to apt-cache --installed rdepends libxft2 Qt4 indeed no longer seems to use Xft (whereas Qt3 did), but Pango still seems to use it. Also, /usr/share/doc/libxft2/copyright contains: It was downloaded from URL: http://xlibs.freedesktop.org/release/libXft-2.1.7.tar.gz . Upstream maintainer: Keith Packard -- Earthling Michel Dänzer |http://www.vmware.com Libre software enthusiast | Debian, X and DRI developer ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Daniel Stone wrote: It's a poor place to not want to slash my wrists. You need some help with your grammar (sorry, I don't have time to teach you). -- Thomas E. Dickey http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Clemens Eisserer wrote: If the interfaces are documented, it's possible to change the library implementations without breaking applications. Well, thats exactly what the protocol specification is about, it contains everything you need to know to implement a library. not really - compare the X protocol specification with the Xlib documentation. The latter makes allowances here/there for the platform on which it's implemented. -- Thomas E. Dickey http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
Michel == Michel Dänzer mic...@daenzer.net writes: Michel but Pango still seems to use [Xft]. Pango has support for multiple backends; on X11 platforms that currently includes xft and cairo. Applications can choose which backend they want. I beleive the cairo backend is recommended for all new apps. -JimC -- James Cloos cl...@jhcloos.com OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6 ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
I can't see any such calls of XRender* functions in the bits of xft that I have been looking at (notably in xftcore.c). Because xft deals with Glyphs, and for performance/bandwith resons glyphs are handled in a special manner. That was what I ment with (using the XRender*Glyphs functions). xftglyphs: XRenderAddGlyphs xftrender: XRenderCompositeText... I mentioned Trapezoids only because everthing else AddGlyph and XPutImage is not really server-side antialiasing, but client-side with server-side blending. (however for glyphs that doesn't matter, they are rasterized once client-side, are uploaded and used again and again by number). However as far as I know xft already has a XRender aware backend (using the XRender*Glyphs functions), as well as legacy support for pre-xrender servers. I have never used xft by myself, but without RENDER knowledge someone can see that: - Probably all functions with *Glyph* inside, are text related - That there are glyph-sets, to which glyphs can be uploaded and rendered from - searching the functions in XFT's source. I know that its not easy, but someone can't expect a step-by-step tutorial for such low-level stuff. For sure the Opera/QT combination is not doing anything like that - all the calls that actually pass glyphs to/from the server use good ol' Xlib. Though there is evidence that xft does use Xrender elsewhere in its workings. I don't know about opera, but im am pretty (99,5%) sure QT uses Render - now if Opera uses QT's graphic context for drawing it will implicitly use it. But who is actually responsible for the development/maintenance of xft? For sure they do not seem to hang around on this list, though I gather they are within the overall Xorg structure somewhere. XFT is more or less a sample implementation, and as far as I know its not used a lot. As far as I know QT does its own glyph handling, so does GTK with pango. - Clemens ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
I know that its not easy, but someone can't expect a step-by-step tutorial for such low-level stuff. hmm - the obvious conclusion is that xft is just a minor/useless library. Perhaps it should be removed, then. The whole discussion is about RENDER's documentation, not xft. Or was your comment directed to potential users (probably not, since it isn't polite to treat users disrespectfully). I've written quite a bunch of answers to charles' questions (even some off-list), so I started to become a bit impatient. At least I tried to help, instead of coming arround, missing the point and telling others howto behave :P ;) - Clemens ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
The whole discussion is about RENDER's documentation, not xft. very well, then apply my comments to RENDER (they're both presented as libraries that no one should try to use without some other library as a sanitizing layer). Well at least the sanitizing layers still depend on libXrender... - Clemens ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
2009/1/26 Thomas Dickey dic...@his.com: On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Clemens Eisserer wrote: I know that its not easy, but someone can't expect a step-by-step tutorial for such low-level stuff. hmm - the obvious conclusion is that xft is just a minor/useless library. Perhaps it should be removed, then. The whole discussion is about RENDER's documentation, not xft. very well, then apply my comments to RENDER (they're both presented as libraries that no one should try to use without some other library as a sanitizing layer). maybe i'm missing the point: what's the point in a library that needs another library in order to be used? i don't really think it's a good idea. maybe it would be better to better implement the library in order for it to be used without another sanitizing library, that would cost more resources. -- dott. ing. beso ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Beso wrote: 2009/1/26 Thomas Dickey dic...@his.com: On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Clemens Eisserer wrote: I know that its not easy, but someone can't expect a step-by-step tutorial for such low-level stuff. hmm - the obvious conclusion is that xft is just a minor/useless library. Perhaps it should be removed, then. The whole discussion is about RENDER's documentation, not xft. very well, then apply my comments to RENDER (they're both presented as libraries that no one should try to use without some other library as a sanitizing layer). maybe i'm missing the point: what's the point in a library that needs another library in order to be used? i don't really think it's a good idea. maybe it would be better to better implement the library in order for it to be used without another sanitizing library, that would cost more resources. A library may provide a useful abstraction (algorithms that can be implemented on top of other system-specific, etc., libraries). If the interfaces are documented, it's possible to change the library implementations without breaking applications. -- Thomas E. Dickey http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
maybe i'm missing the point: what's the point in a library that needs another library in order to be used? i don't really think it's a good idea. maybe it would be better to better implement the library in order for it to be used without another sanitizing library, Its the same as with xcb or Xlib. Both aren't used a lot directly by application programmers, instead programmers use QT4/Gtk or Java2D as sanitizing libraries Xlib's task is to allow access to the X11 protocol from C, exatly what libXrender does for the RENDER extension. that would cost more resources. libXRender only contains X11 protocol generation and a few definitions. If Cairo/QT4/... would have to generate the protocol themself, it would probably lead to a lot of duplicate code and bloat. If the interfaces are documented, it's possible to change the library implementations without breaking applications. Well, thats exactly what the protocol specification is about, it contains everything you need to know to implement a library. However, the protocol specification is not a programmer manual howto use RENDER or libXRender, and at least what I've heard, this is what most people are asking for (including myself about a year ago ;) ). - Clemens ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 09:25:09PM -0500, Thomas Dickey wrote: There are, in fact, well-known apps using Xlib directly. There are well-known people who follow the Atkins diet, but I wouldn't really recommend it. (xorg mailing list is a poor place to learn about X) It's a poor place to not want to slash my wrists. Cheers, Daniel signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
In fe028d69955796489b510ce43dbbe803112cd...@rrsmsx503.amr.corp.intel.com Wichmann, Mats D mats.d.wichm...@intel.com writes: It seems that a library providing an API ought to have docs, even if the main consumer is another library. That way the producer/consumer relationship is codified and there's actually something to refer to if one or the other changes. Absolutely so. The main reason people might need it, even if they were not toolkit developers, is so that they could trace apparent bugs or other misfeatures that they had encountered in some application. In my case, I was looking for some unacceptable CPU usage in Opera, which is built on top of QT. I traced that down to a bug/misfeature in libxft, which I reported on this list on Nov 26th under the Subject LibXft : xftglyphcore woes, hoping to catch the eye of the libxft developers (sadly, noone responded). Essentially, libxft was making a meal out of its anti-aliasing, and I proposed a patch which at least cured the symptoms. In a subsequent thread 2D antialiasing? on this list, I was bemoaning the fact that antialiasing by that method would waste huge amounts of bandwidth if the client were separated from the Xserver by some slow network, and someone claimed to me, offlist, that Xrender provided server-side antialiasing. So I wanted to verify that claim. Now that this list has pointed me to Keith Packard's The X Rendering Extension, I have done a quick scan of that, but can still find no mention of antialiasing. Moreover, that describes the protocol, rather than the libXrender interface that is more conveniently used to access it, Xrender is in LSB, but is not documented. As a result, LSB would be willing to help if there's interest in working up docs. Or, alternatively, listen to an argument that a library like Xrender actually shouldn't be in the spec, that only cairo should be exposed. Yes, that would be welcome, but this is not really a Linux problem. It is an Xorg problem. -- Charles H. Lindsey -At Home, doing my own thing Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: c...@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5 ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
Most likely I will write some XRender documentation as part of my bachelor thesis. In a subsequent thread 2D antialiasing? on this list, I was bemoaning the fact that antialiasing by that method would waste huge amounts of bandwidth if the client were separated from the Xserver by some slow network, and someone claimed to me, offlist, that Xrender provided server-side antialiasing. So I wanted to verify that claim. Now that this list has pointed me to Keith Packard's The X Rendering Extension, I have done a quick scan of that, but can still find no mention of antialiasing. Moreover, that describes the protocol, rather than the libXrender interface that is more conveniently used to access it, Yes, that was me ;) Antialiasing is usually done by transferring the geometry you intend to render into a mask-pixmap, this can be done with: - XPutImage (client-side geometry rasterization) - XRenderAddTraps and doing a composite operation with that mask. or by using an implicit mask with: - XRenderCompositeTrapezoids However as far as I know xft already has a XRender aware backend (using the XRender*Glyphs functions), as well as legacy support for pre-xrender servers. - Clemens ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
Hi Charles, Unfourtunatly XRender is not very well documented, probably the best thing available is the specification. The reason is that most programmers use higher-level APIs like Cairo or QT4 to access XRender, so if you don't have a good reason why you directly want to mess with it I recommend using cairo too. - Clemens ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Clemens Eisserer wrote: Hi Charles, Unfourtunatly XRender is not very well documented, probably the best thing available is the specification. hmm - googling on that (xrender specification) doesn't find much - just these random notes here for instance: http://keithp.com/~keithp/render/protocol.html which only covers a very small fraction of the library. (Since it's apparently undocumented - I looked some time ago and concluded that the documentation covered at most 10% of the code, the best thing available would appear to be the source code - with the caveat that change-history also appears to be lacking). The reason is that most programmers use higher-level APIs like Cairo or QT4 to access XRender, so if you don't have a good reason why you directly want to mess with it I recommend using cairo too. In that case, a pointer to the detailed api of cairo would help Charles. -- Thomas E. Dickey http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
Re: libXrender - documentation?
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Thomas Dickey dic...@his.com wrote: On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Clemens Eisserer wrote: Hi Charles, Unfourtunatly XRender is not very well documented, probably the best thing available is the specification. hmm - googling on that (xrender specification) doesn't find much - just these random notes here for instance: http://keithp.com/~keithp/render/protocol.html which only covers a very small fraction of the library. (Since it's apparently undocumented - I looked some time ago and concluded that the documentation covered at most 10% of the code, the best thing available would appear to be the source code - with the caveat that change-history also appears to be lacking). The reason is that most programmers use higher-level APIs like Cairo or QT4 to access XRender, so if you don't have a good reason why you directly want to mess with it I recommend using cairo too. In that case, a pointer to the detailed api of cairo would help Charles. http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/renderproto/tree/renderproto.txt Alex ___ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
