Re: GDK_FONT_XFTFONT

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 12 o'clock on Feb 25, Owen Taylor wrote:

> (My big performance problem with Xft right now is computing
> coverage information, which either will be fixed with some
> more code on our end or when we switch to fontconfig.)

I've a question on that front -- Fontconfig computes coverage information 
itself; should we change Pango to push the coverage down to the rasterizer 
instead of forcing Pango to walk the Fontconfig coverage information?
Fontconfig has an efficient coverage walking API, but avoiding it 
altogether would be better.

The patch I created for Pango/Gtk+ will (eventually) compile with either 
version of Xft, and the newer library will make it into distributions 
relatively quickly as it is required for the Xft version of Mozilla.

As the Pango API isn't affected by this change, it will be easy to roll 
the patch into the regular Pango release at some point.

> People use IRC with non-ASCII encodings - ISO-8859-1 in Europe,
> one of the Japanese encodings in Japan. I suspect UTF-8
> could be used as well, and if not, you want i18n support to
> support this use of legacy encodings.