Re: ps/tt fonts in gnome apps

[Miroslav Silovic <silovic zesoi fer hr>]

Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> writes:

> On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Miles Lane wrote:
> > Has a request for this functionality been made to the XFree86 people?
> 
> Presumably they know about the problem, I'm not sure it's easy for
> them to solve. Fonts are a very complicated problem and the XFree
> people are probably experts on graphics cards, not fonts.

And also because not everybody will run GNOME on XFree86.

> > why is X such a memory hog?  It seems to me that
> 
> It isn't really. Note that the "X" process contains lots of
> resources (pixmaps and windows, etc.) that actually belong to
> applications. So if your X is using tons of RAM it's likely because
> you are running lots of apps. If you run E or GTK with a pixmap
> theme you'll really chew up some RAM - note that all those pixmaps
> are stored in X, not in the apps.

X can handle compressed graphics (JPEG, for instance) since X11R6. The
extension is called XIE (same as X Input Extension but this one means
X Image Extension) and can do things like image processing filters,
compression and decompression on the fly.

Its API is almost impossible to figure, though, and I'm not sure about
its stability in most X servers - nothing really uses it.

> Remember that X was designed something like 15 years ago, when
> hardware was far inferior...

It was designed with high-end hardware in mind, though. The problem is
that X APIs are not necessarily well-known.

-- 
How to eff the ineffable?