Re: Say goodbye to core X fonts

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 04:05, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> Le mar 15/04/2003 �7:59, Owen Taylor a �it :
> > I'm just about ready to delete the pangox backend from the HEAD
> > branch of Pango.
> > 
> > To reiterate the reasons:
> > 
> >  - With Xft2, there is no good reason that anybody should need
> >    to use core X fonts rather than Xft.
> > 
> >    - Xft2 and current versions of FreeType can access bitmap
> >      fonts in BDF or PCF format.
> 
> Well, currently, in Mdk 9.1, I have to disable Xft2 backend for the
> following locales otherwise we have really ugly rendering : el, ka, ar,
> ur, fa (we lack georgian, greek, arabic scalable fonts) and yi (the
> provided hebrew Type1 fonts are bugged, don't work in Xft)
> 
> Are we sure we can have similar (or better) rendering with Xft2 backend
> ?

Yes. 

There are fine scalable Arabic fonts available under
the GPL. While there are decent Greek outlines available, they
aren't well packaged into a nice set of fonts, but that could
be fixed.

Georgian, I don't know about available  fonts, but IMO, _creating_ a
Georgian font from scratch would be less work than trying to maintain
the old core X code.

Plus, Xft can be used with Greek/Georgian bitmaps without any
problems.

If there are problems that are occurring with common
freely-distributable Hebrew fonts and Yiddish, we need to either
to fix the fonts or fix the engine.

Regards,
                                     Owen