On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 12:41:37AM +1000, James Gregory said > 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).
Yes, afaik, too. Note that anything using fontconfig or xft can't use a font-server anyway. > 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. Sure. > I generally have GDM start up a couple of X servers on boot, so > there's presumably a saving there. Right. > 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. Yeah. > 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. Ok. > 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. Sure. These are all good points, but 99% of desktop users don't run multiple X servers, aren't trying to circumvent proprietary font licenses, but are using client-side font-rendering...I know a font server is of use to some people in fairly specialised situations, but I'm quite surprised that "desktopy" distros are installing it at all. So, er, yeah, it was more a "general" why than a "you" why :) -- Words of the day: cracking Roswell genetic Majic Yukon munitions Defcon Becker
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