On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Jesse Hutton wrote:
> My test scenario consists of enabling only these fontpaths in XF86Config-4
> and commenting out the local font servers unix/:7100 and unix/:7110 (I'm
> using XFree86-4.2.1-6 from debian unstable, btw):
>
> FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/:unscalled"
:unscalled should probably be :unscaled like the other lines
> FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
> FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
> Another thing I noticed is that the fonts in Mozilla, my test application
> of choice, get uglier when I uncomment these two lines in XF86Config-4.
>
> # FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
> # FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
>
> I've tried allowing xfs-xtt to serve up my TrueType and CID directories
> as well, but I get the same result--uglier fonts in Mozilla. Is this just
> because those unscaled fonts in /misc, /75dpi, and /100dpi are cleaner
> under X, and when X is forced to use them only, everything looks good?
> I'm pretty confused.
I don't know what extra fonts you have in /misc but for the
:unscaled versions of the standard fonts in those three directories
it shouldn't be possible to make anything else look better, nor
possible to make them look worse. I'm confused too, unless there
is a bug in xfs.
> And this gives me the best results I've been able to achieve so far. But,
> I thought using xfs was a *good* thing to do, and that truetype fonts made
> things prettier...Does not using xfs hurt performance much in X? Font
> gurus, please help.
Both the X server and Xfs are supposed to use the same font rendering
technologies (although there are many versions of each, and many options).
As I understand it, technically TrueType fonts aren't as good as Type1
fonts, but it is harder to code great Type1 font hints.
Bitmapped fonts (shipped in misc, 75dpi and 100dpi) with the :unscaled
option should always look at least as good as any scalable fonts,
but if the system ever scales them (try removing the :unscaled from the
config file) they can look awful.
Both TrueType and Type1 have hinting mechanisms; one or both is
covered by patents and FreeType is often compiled in a way that makes
the fonts look less good to avoid infringing the patent. If your font
server uses FreeType compiled one way and your X server uses FreeType
the other way, that would make a big difference for some fonts.
If you have large fonts (think unicode) then your font mechnism will be
slow to start; xfs allows this startup delay to be separated from
the X server startup. Beyond that I don't think there is aperformance
difference.
--
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
_______________________________________________
XFree86 mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
