Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>]

On Wed, 2002-10-02 at 18:27, Ami Fischman wrote:

> Is anyone working on adding Xft/freetype/anti-alias support to emacs?

I worked on this for a bit a few months ago.  However, it became very
complicated, and I mostly abandoned the project.  If you're interested
in picking up where I left off, I've put up the files I modified here:
http://web.verbum.org/~walters/files/emacs-xrender

> Equivalently, is there any work being done on a gtk/qt-specific port of the
> windowing code?  ("equivalent" because both toolkits support Xft natively
> in their most recent incarnations (2.0 and 3.0, resp).

A GTK+/GNOME 2 port would be significant effort.  One big issue would be
dealing with the fact that GTK+ 2's "TextView" widget also implements a
fair portion of Emacs' display capabilities.  For example, it has the
equivalent of text properties.  It also supports more than Emacs does;
specifically full Unicode and bidirectional text.

So maybe the way to do it would be to just ignore GtkTextView, and just
use the scrollbar, menu, and dialog stuff.  I think that's what XEmacs
does.  Even then you're talking about a whole lot of work.