Re: GTK+-2.x planning

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 16 o'clock on Mar 14, Owen Taylor wrote:

> Still, I think we are going to have to keep an reasonbaly thick
> abstraction layer over it because of portability concerns to other
> platforms.  I think using fontconfig / Xft2 on Windows would be
> considerably suboptimal.

What we need is an abstraction that can cover printing and display on any 
particular system; Windows already has that with GDI.  X can have that if 
we're willing to move to FT/Fontconfig.

> (RENDER really needs to be finished before I would start feeling
> comfortable saying: "you don't have RENDER? your fonts are slow? Well,
> tough." Or does there need to be a defined RENDER subset that excludes
> the unfinished parts?)

For local applications, the core implementation is surprisingly usable, 
around 20000 glyphs/sec.

In any case, Render is going to get finished soon; I have a separate 
project that needs the image scaling and polygons to work, and that's all 
that remains in the extension.  If I hadn't gotten stuck in font hell, I'd 
have done that a long time ago...

The Render version advertised by the server is still not 1.0; each time I 
add more functionality, I bump the minor version number so that 
applications can tell what is implemented and what is not.  I envision 
adding more refinements to the extension in the future; I'd like to 
provide a compressed image and glyph transport mechanism to reduce wire 
bandwidth usage.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab