Re: The WHY of Xft

[Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:49:50 -0500, James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> wrote:
> My understanding is that when a (server-side) font is opened by the
> X server it must determine all of the glyphs' metrics, which requires
> rendering all of them.

I think this is not true -- it seems to be exactly this behavior which
-deferglyphs stops.  Without -deferglyphs, there was indeed a
noticeable freeze when using a CJK font for the first time; I've not
encountered this freeze since.  Debian has had -deferglyphs as the
default for quite a long time (e.g. if you use gdm, in
/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf); perhaps other distros do not.

Can xft still use bitmap fonts?  In the case of CJK, the commonly
available X bitmap fonts do seem to be generally more attractive at
typical text-editor size than what freetype produces for commonly[*]
available scaled fonts.

[*] By commonly available, I really mean "free and packaged in Debian"
...  Not the best definition I suppose, but maybe indicative of what a
typical lazy user like me sees...

I'm all for xft BTW; don't let my sniping give you the opposite
impression... :-)

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.