From: Phil!Gregory Date: 17:09 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: Fonts and X Fonts have been around for quite some time. Even TrueType fonts have been an everyday part of people's lives for a great many years now. Why is it, exactly, that I can't get my programs to use all of the fonts on my computer? Well, X is broken. X likes to deal with strict bitmap fonts. None of that scalable, TrueType, stuff. No, that's too newfangled for X. People used to work around this by making font servers that took scalable fonts, prescaled them for common sizes, and pretended to the X server that they were bitmaps. Which worked, more or less, though you still had to deal with X's wonderful font naming scheme. Then came XFree86 4.<mumble>. "Oh," said they, "It supports scalable fonts natively now. No need for those nasty font servers." Well, that's a lie hidden inside a truth. They wrote an extension for X that supports scalable and other sorts of fonts. Who uses this extension? Well, GTK 2.2. And maybe KDE. And approximately no one else in the universe. Probably because it's only in XFree86. (But "will hopefully be included by [other X11 implementations] in the future.") My needs are simple. I want TrueType fonts in Mozilla. Mozilla says it supports TrueType fonts. Surely that means it's brave and daring and uses the new Xft extension, right? No, of course not. The wise Mozilla developers decided that it would be better to build TrueType support *right into Mozilla*, so you have to go out of your way and make sure Mozilla knows where your TrueType fonts are. It can't figure this out on its own; it has to be told. Why can't there be one solution that works well and everyone uses so end users don't have to worry about stuff like this. Font support should be something that just works. Yeah, it's probably more likely that everyone will magically decide to standardize on a single widget toolkit.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 17:24 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: Fonts and X > Well, X is broken. In many ways. > X likes to deal with strict bitmap fonts. None of > that scalable, TrueType, stuff. No, that's too newfangled for X. One of the deep design assumptions in X: servers have to render windows bitmap-precise. This makes a lot of things break. > My needs are simple. I want TrueType fonts in Mozilla. Mozilla says it > supports TrueType fonts. Surely that means it's brave and daring and uses > the new Xft extension, right? No, of course not. The wise Mozilla > developers decided that it would be better to build TrueType support > *right into Mozilla*, so you have to go out of your way and make sure > Mozilla knows where your TrueType fonts are. It can't figure this out on > its own; it has to be told. Mozilla is also broken in many ways. One of which is its insistence that it do its own rendering down to the bitmap level. I'm sure this is more of the same. > Why can't there be one solution that works well and everyone uses so end > users don't have to worry about stuff like this. Font support should be > something that just works. Yeah, it's probably more likely that everyone > will magically decide to standardize on a single widget toolkit. They used to. All the old stuff used Athena, which meant you could install Xaw3d or Xaw95 and theme the whole system (which is, Mozilla people take note, where themes SHOULD be). But that was before OSF and UI decided to have a fight over whether Motif (the world's ugliest 3d-look) or OpenLook (which until Apple came up with metal was the world champion in wasting screen space on incomprehensible widgets) could piss the furthest.
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