pango + Xft2 without XRender

[Tim Mooney <mooney dogbert cc ndsu NoDak edu>]

[please Cc: me on replies, I'm not subscribed to gtk-list]

All-

I've done some searching of the gtk-list archives, and haven't really
found an answer to my question.  If it's there (or elsewhere) and I missed
it, my apologies and please point me in the right direction.

My desktop system (Tru64 UNIX 5.1b) is a platform that supports TrueType
fonts directly in the X server (it's based on FreeType 1.x, I'm
investigating if they'll ever upgrade to the much improved FreeType
2.1.3+).  Like virtually every other commercial UNIX platform I've seen
(including Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, and AIX), the X server does not support
the Render extension.  Tru64's X server with 5.1b is based on X11 R6.5.

Since the X server doesn't support Render but it does have marginal
TrueType support, I initially compiled pango-1.2.1 without Xft2.

Now I'm running into applications (e.g. gimp 1.3.x) that will not even
configure unless your version of pango was built with Xft2 support.

The Xft2 information on fontconfig.org make it pretty clear that if you're
using an X server that doesn't support Render, anti-aliased text may very
well need to be turned off to get decent text display performance.

If that's the case, what reason is there to build pango with Xft2 support
on platforms like Tru64 or Solaris, where X, PostScript, and even TrueType
fonts are already supported and the anti-aliasing capabilities of Xft2 may
not even be useable in practice?

Any information you can provide would be much appreciated.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                              mooney dogbert cc ndsu NoDak edu
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