<quote who="Christopher Vance"> > Prior to fontconfig, I think I understood how things worked. > > I'm trying to get a selfcompiled copy of vlc running on the thin clients, > and I'm trying to work out whether fontconfig needs to run on the xfs > server, on the X server (= xfs client), or both.
Ok, first part of the answer: These technologies are totally unrelated. :-) xfs only works with the old school X fonts system, which were all 'server' side (ie. the machine that does the display renders the fonts; in your case, the X terminal). Modern X font rendering is all done 'client' side (ie. the machine running the piece of software, no matter where it is displayed). So, you'll have to readjust to font rendering with modern X and common toolkits. A GTK+ application, for instance, uses fontconfig to grok which fonts are available and how their names map (you might remap 'Arial' to 'Nimbus', or even use individual characters from another fonts if some are missing from the one you chose). It uses Pango to do a lot of the internationalisation smarts such as complex scripting or right-to-left rendering. It will use freetype for doing the client side font rendering. It may use the RENDER X extention to accelerate the display of fonts on the X server. But it does *not* use any of the fonts from the X server config (the 'Fonts' paths in xorg.conf, including the xfs tcp/unix path). All the X server really needs these days is the Fixed font, and possibly some others for legacy application compatibility. :-) It doesn't matter what fontconfig thinks on the machine that runs the X server because it no longer has a role to play in the rendering of fonts. Just the display. - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2007: Sydney, Australia http://lca2007.linux.org.au/ "I think of [commercial Open Source development] as being the biggest private investment in public works in decades." - Andrew Tridgell -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
