Re: pango + Xft2 without XRender

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

In regard to: Re: pango + Xft2 without XRender, Havoc Pennington said (at...:

>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

Thanks Havoc, that's exactly what I was looking for.  Owen's rationale
and your supplemental information below are both much appreciated.  Some
or all of his info + yours should be added to Pango's README (or NEWS, or
CHANGES).  What you and Owen have to say about the issue should completely
answer the questions that people that are on commercial UNIX platforms are
likely to have about what's needed and why.


>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.

Thanks again,

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                              mooney dogbert cc ndsu NoDak edu
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