Re: Heads up on Pango HEAD

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 21 o'clock on Jun 5, Arnaud Charlet wrote:

> Giving the choice to people who do not have top end boxes or systems

There's nothing inherantly expensive about moving fonts from inside the X
server to inside the X client.  In many ways, it's more efficient and it
provides better memory management than is easily possible with core X text
requests.  Xft builds glyphs and metrics as needed, unlike the core
protocol which must render every glyph before the first can be drawn on the
screen.

> to use existing configurations without having to install dozens of
> additional packages and fight against the burden of porting and adapting

The dependency adventures are temporary; as the new libraries become a 
standard part of every X installation this extra burden will disappear.
I've tried to make the burden as small as possible while providing new
functionality.

XFree86 will provide a complete implementation of Xft for all supported
systems without dependencies beyond those required today; I expect other
distributions that intend on supporting Gnome applications will do the 
same.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab