Re: ISO-8859-2 fonts

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

Hello!

> > The biggest problem is, that, using GdkCanvas, we have to draw fonts via
> > pixmaps - it means generating loads of pixmaps on X server in case you
> > happen to have many fonts - and it can become real show-stopper in
> > some real-world situation (my XFree4.0 16MB server seems to handle
> > 3-5 fonts well - but how about different X servers etc.)
>
> Well, you could always render the entire font into a single pixmap on
> the server, like this:
>
>       ABCDEFGHIJKL.....

I have thought about doing thing that way. More exactly, to have some
standard-sized (256x256) pixmaps, allocated and filled on-demand (Xfree
used to allocated video memory in 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256 blocks,
so standard sized blocks will use video memory most efficently - but
I do not know - maybe XFree4 is more flexible). That is doable.

> Does this sound like a reasonable plan for avoiding having thousands
> of pixmaps?
>
> > I hope that most X servers can handle that load. If it turns out to be
> > a problem, we have either to use antialased canvas, or wait for new
> > X rendering extensions, in which case gnome-font will be responsible to
> > supply X with fine-tuned fonts anyway.
>
> Yeah, but this will only be deployed in a few servers, we need to
> support all X servers, so we would still need a fallback mechanism.

If you agree, I can create gnumeric (and possibly gnome-print) branch and
do a little field-testing.

Lauris