On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 21:53 +1000, Rob Weir wrote: > On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 04:47:10PM +1000, Malik Jayawardena said > > Hi Nick, > > > > Thanks for the reply. > > > > We've acutally just sussed it out. Apparently FC2 has font scaling > > disabled by default. All we did was add these two lines under > > "*catalogue=*" to the > > */etc/X11/fs/config* and it fixed it. > > Fedora still uses a font server by default? Why?
Why are you saying "still"? My Mandrake laptop (recently installed) is running the xorg X11 server and its default config is to talk to a font server. I was under the impression that it's pretty common practice. In addition to the old-skool XDrawText calls which would use those fonts are the various systems that do client-side rendering and use the Xrender extension to put fonts on the screen. Keep in mind that these are separate systems (as far as I know). Anyway, it seems to me like a relatively sensible thing to do -- it means you only need to load font data once between X servers. I generally have GDM start up a couple of X servers on boot, so there's presumably a saving there. Likewise, there's probably a time saving in font loading time. There'll probably be a delay involved in IPC, but it won't be worse than the overhead you already suffer from the X infrastructure. My understanding is that the XFree86 X server is single- threaded atm, so it's likely that using a font-server would allow you to continue interacting with the machine whilst fonts are being loaded. That's not an absolute reason for having a font server in an X implementation, it's just a reason for it with the dominant ones. That might also be false :) The real reason to me though is that there's a fair bit of work involved in dealing with fonts. I tend to have heaps of them installed. Having the code to do that work in a separate process is a logical division to my mind. It buys you stability in that a dodgy font won't take down a running X server (well, not necessarily true, but it's another layer to get through). You might need to restart your font server, but that's acceptable. That can also be automated if need be. I suppose I can also envisage situations where having a font-server would allow you to enforce a site-license for a commercial font. Not an issue here I suppose, but it's another reason for maintaining that separation. Anyway, HTH. James. -- James Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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