Subject: Re: UNIX & Fonts -- the big view
From: Eric W. Sink (eric@sourcegear.com)
Date: Sun Apr 30 2000 - 17:18:16 CDT
>I'm not sure who you've contacted so far, but for this problem, you'll
>probably want to get input from the GNOME people, as well. Specifically,
>I'd contact Raph Levien (who wrote most of the graphic subsystems used in
>GNOME). I remember reading some interview with him where he was talking
>about GNOME solutions to the font problem. Something lower level which
>could be used by GNOME, KDE, or UNIX applications directly would be even
>better.
In general, moving the font problem inside the app seems like a good
idea. In experimental practice, this has not worked out so well.
An early version of AbiWord did all of its font rendering by itself,
using t1lib. The performance was simply awful, even when setting
all of the higher-performance options t1lib was able to offer.
I ended up with the conclusion that truly high-performance drawing of
fonts may be tough to achieve as long as the X11 protocol is sitting
in the middle of things. I would be pleased (and relieved) to be
proven wrong, but the only empirical data points I've seen thus far
did not seem very encouraging.
Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman
SourceGear Corporation
eric@sourcegear.com
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