Re: pango + Xft2 without XRender

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 02:52:44PM -0500, Tim Mooney wrote: 
> 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.

See: 
 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2003-April/msg00176.html
 
> 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?

It's a misconception that fontconfig/Xft2 are about antialiasing. Yes
they support antialiasing (which the old core X font system does not, 
even if it uses truetype fonts that could be antialiased).

However, AA is just a cosmetic thing. fontconfig/Xft2 are more
importantly a replacement font subsystem - the old X one sucks.

fontconfig/Xft2 should work just fine without RENDER, so that allows
us to drop support for the old X fonts. Apps that are already
requiring Xft2 pango are probably using some of the new features that 
the new font system allows. GNOME 2.2 also requires a pango with
fontconfig, for example.

RENDER is just a hardware acceleration that makes AA draw faster.  If
you don't have RENDER you may need to turn AA off for performance
reasons, but fontconfig/Xft2 allow you to do that.

Havoc