Re: Heads up on Pango HEAD

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 15 o'clock on Jun 5, Erwann Chenede wrote:

> I've tried to compile Xft from fcpackage.02-06-03.01-31 from Keith's ftp site
> without XRender as I believe it is only an XFree extension atm.
> and As Xft.h is including <X11/extensions/Xrender.h> I believe this mean that
> Xrender is required.

You can build the client side of Render without needing the server side; 
the necessary files are included in the fcpackage available on my web 
server at http://keithp.com/fonts.  

I would strongly encourage you to build the Render client side libraries
and use them; it means that remote displays with Render will have
reasonable performance for AA text, AA text using the core protocol over
the wire is a bit sluggish.  Using the core protocol for local AA text
rendering provides acceptable performance.

I'm pretty reluctant to consider making the Render parts of Xft compiled 
in conditionally; there's very little code required (around 30KB) for both 
the library and Xft support.

> Cool, I don't think GNOME needs another xml parser.

Agreed -- the original fontconfig implementation used libxml2 instead of 
expat, but that library doesn't build cleanly on the BSDies because it 
requires iconv.  I couldn't include iconv in XFree86 because it is 
licensed LGPL instead of MIT, so I switched to expat.  The 500KB memory 
savings was also a contributing factor for applications which don't 
already use libxml2.

I would most willingly accept patches to fontconfig to make it also use
libxml2 if others are more interested in getting that running sooner than
I; I'm focused on making sure fontconfig and pango are working well 
together before the initial fontconfig/Xft2 release.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab