TrueType and Gnome

[nelson media mit edu (Nelson Minar)]

Lots more talk about fonts. Several people wrote to say that TrueType
is really the right thing because it gives hints for rasterizing a
font at low resolutions so you don't get hideous things. XFree86
doesn't do TrueType now but there's hope that 4.0 will. In the
meantime, there's an X font server based on FreeType called xfsft at
  http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/programs/xfsft/

So one thing that might improve Gnome is to put in official support
for TrueType. This would require two things: a way to render TrueType
into X (provided either by xfsft or XFree86), and a consistent
interface to TrueType fonts that makes sense. The big payoff here is
it might help fix the X font situation. As Todd Lewis says,

>Just declare open season on the X font model, so long as what comes
>out is reverse compatible, which should not be too hard.

I think xfsft might be a path towards doing that. The hope is that
TrueType fonts are reasonably sane so that one can, for instance,
expect that a 16 point font really is bigger on the screen than a 15
point font.


But there's another interesting option. Rasterman says:
>you could always use freetype directly like E does to get anti-aliased
>fonts..:) then you have control at the aplication level.. :)

I really like this idea. The problem is that X doesn't support
anti-aliased fonts and isn't likely to anytime soon (X fonts are
inherently monochrome, see the xfsft home page). So instead of using X
fonts, why not build a new client-side string renderer for Gnome?
Gnome apps that chose to then could have spiffy anti-aliased fonts on
the screen. It will be slower, but maybe not too much so on the same
machine. It might suck badly across the network.

Anyone care to guess how hard this would be for a relatively simple
application, say gnome-terminal? Does eterm do this already? Does
anyone else think this is a good idea, or am I crazy?


To reiterate, I'm suggesting two possibilities:

Build a support library for Gnome to use TrueType fonts as X fonts.
This requires gluing in xfsft until an XFree with TrueType rendering
comes out, and maybe making an improved font selection widget. Doesn't
require any serious change to X, and most of the pieces are already written.

Build a library for rendering strings with FreeType, not using X's
font support at all. This replaces a big chunk of how X works but
would look really nice.