Subject: Re: Fonts and XFree 4.0
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Nov 30 1999 - 12:41:35 CST
Cool! Any idea what the ETA for this solution will be? I'm presuming it'll
be a while before this capability is developed, much less widely deployed.
Paul
At 07:22 PM 11/28/99 -0600, Justin Bradford wrote:
>This is just an "FYI-post", but it sounds like AbiWord's problems with X's
>limited font abilities will be addressed in XFree 4.0.
>
>Keith Packard <keithp@suse.com> posted the following on the xfree-devel
>list:
>
>> Recall also that one persistant request is that font outline and metric
>> information be shared between the X server and the application. There
>> are two obvious ways of solving this; either have the X server and
>> application share the font files, or extend the existing X Font
>> Services Protocol to include additional font data and have the
>> application to connect to the font server along with the X server. The
>> latter will clearly be required, sharing files would probably be a
>> reasonable optimization for the local case.
>
>I followed that up by asking if the above extensions will provide the
>functionality needed for AbiWord, and here is his reply:
>
>> We're only talking about the display at this point, but yes, the idea is
>> to provide enough information to accurately position glyphs on the
>> screen, information equivalent to that found in the .afm file. For
>> printing, the problem is different as the hard part is knowing what
>> fonts the printer provides; if you can map printer fonts back to the
>> improved X fonts, then the information provided would be sufficent
>> for printing as well.
>
>Anyway, it sounds to me that 4.0 will allow us to use whatever fonts are
>on the system (instead of just the ones distributed with AbiWord). Of
>course, it will include a TrueType font server, as well.
>
>Justin
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