[geeks] X font rendering, was Re: [rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

NOTE: I am cc'ing this hear only so you see it.  Moved to geeks
otherwise.

Sat, 13 May 2006 @ 23:37 -0400, der Mouse said:

> > No idea.  It could be this is all done client side and bitmaps just
> > shipped over...
> 
> Well, I don't know what XRender provides, but base X font handling
> *can't* do antialiased fonts.

I assume what you mean is that the X server sans extensions and new libraries
doesn't do antialiased fonts.

Freetype became part of X some time ago, at least a couple of years now.

Or maybe you mean you have to use the Xft library.

That's true, but then really good font handling in X has always required
extra libraries because the font support was so bad for years

You can use Xft in all X apps because the server will fall back to character
cell and outline fonts if the Render extension is not available.

I don't know how it will look, but it will probably run well enough to keep
reminding you to upgrade.

> I have.  Not charcell fonts, which may be what you're thinking of, but
> monospaced fonts which aren't charcell, yes.  (The difference between
> monospaced and charcell is that a charcell font has all pixels of each
> character inside the box implied by the ascent, descent, and width; a
> monospaced font has the same width for each character but may have
> pixels outside that box for some - or even all - characters.)

Yep, that's basically it.

However, I didn't think Monaco had any pixels outside its bounding box.

I know two of the others I tried do though. You can see if you fire up a font
editor.

I generally do a terrible job working on fonts, at least so far.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The strength of the Constitution lies
entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it.  Only if every
single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the
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