Re: TrueType and Gnome

[Jo Dillon <emily thelonious new ox ac uk>]

Nelson Minar (nelson@media.mit.edu) spake thusly:


> 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?
> 

  Harmony does this already. It's not especially hard, especially if
you don't want anti-aliasing. If you /do/ want anti-aliasing life
is more difficult, and the performance will suck over a network.
The current Harmony Truetype font code is about 470 lines and
doesn't do anti-aliasing. The speed's not brilliant but certainly
usable.
 
> 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.
> 

  If you go for the latter I'd be interested in cooperating with gnome
over configuration file formats and suchlike.
 
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- -- 
	Jo

Harmony - the project to create an LGPL Qt clone
http://harmony.ruhr.de
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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
	Jo

Harmony - the project to create an LGPL Qt clone
http://harmony.ruhr.de