Re: TrueType and Gnome

[Eric Kidd <eric kidd pobox com>]

On Mon, Aug 24, 1998 at 12:37:41PM -0400, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
> That really doesn't matter, though, does it?  Are you really going to say,
> "In order to use GNOME under Solaris, you have to configure your X server
> to use the GNOME font server, which you also have to add to your system
> startup scripts.  Oh yeah, when you patch your OS and it nukes the xfsft
> script, then all GNOME apps will break by virtue of being fontless"?

Well, more to the point, if you want to use TrueType fonts under Solaris,
you'll need to run a TrueType font server. But font servers aren't exactly
difficult to run, and you can run them from your private .xinit or
.xsession files if you don't have root access. Installing these is
certainly less work than compiling the rest of Gnome. =)
 
> If you want it to be truly portable, then you have to do it above the
> X server.  This sucks big time, for the following reason.

A really sane approach would be:

 * Require a font server for TrueType fonts.
 * Provide lots of support for non-TrueType fonts.
 * Know how to make use of TrueType fonts if they are available.

If you want to support anti-aliased fonts, you have a couple of
choices. The first is to do everything with an application library and send
bitmaps to the X server. This is slow, and requires everything from text
editing to international input methods to be faked by the application.
Quite frankly, this is a lot of work and would be disasterously slow.

A better approach would be to write an X extension and fix the server to
support anti-aliased fonts. This is no small feat, but probably the Right
Thing<tm> to do. For systems which lack this extension, you could either
provide a library version (like above) or just use jaggy TrueType fonts.

Quite frankly, X's font support sucks so bad it hurts. The lack of
anti-aliasing, the cryptic font selection dialogs, and the obscure font
installation procedures add up to a dismal user experience. I'd love to see
some way to clean this up without breaking compatibility with all the other
X servers out there.

Cheers,
Eric
(who wished he knew enough X to fix this nonsense)