Re: abisuite (anti-aliased fonts)
Justin Bradford (justin@ukans.edu)
Wed, 5 May 1999 12:57:35 -0500 (CDT)
> > I talked a bit with the author of the library, and his opinion was
> > basically "client-side fonts will always be really slow when you're
> > doing as much drawing as a word processor does." X just can't
> > push pixels between the client and the server that fast. Normal
> > Type 1 scaling and rasterization occurs in the server, and things
> > are pretty snappy.
>
> But it could be faster if DPS was used? Or GLX, even? There is no code
> which does anti-aliasing this way, but I'm just wondering about the
> possibilities. If DPS can help, it would be a good reason to learn how
> to use it.
XFree 4.0 will support Truetype, as well as any other font people want to
add, via a font server module. I believe these fonts will at least have
the appearance of anti-aliased, using several passes plotting lighter
pixels to smooth out the characters. They were doing it this way, as it
allowed them to take advantage of hardware acceleration even for the
"anti-aliasing" effect.
Worrying about aliased fonts before a good portion of the functionality is
in place seems backwards, especially considering that someone else will
probably solve this for Abiword anyway.
Justin Bradford
justin@ukans.edu
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