On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 11:30:18PM +0200, Uriel wrote:
I certainly think that having such possibility will be good. I know that font systems are a quite mad, and utf8 is far more complex than just plain ascii or bitmapped fonts. In fact ttf is a virtual machine, and opentype supports as weird things as many different capital letters or combinations of two chars. This is great for typographic ppl, and they tend to defend this position in benefit of ease of reading.

I know nothing about all this crap, but why not just use FreeType to
render the fonts into a bitmap, and ignore the whole retarded
X-font-systems? Or you could just use the *real* libdraw, which
handles bitmap fonts quite nicely (and if you want another font at
another size, you can always generate it).

Have you ever *tried* to write a text rendering engine from scratch using Freetype? It's not as simple as it sounds. First you actually have to find the fonts, lookup their names and variants, and decide which one to use based on an arbitrary name. Then you have to individually render and kern each individual glyph, which isn't actually too terribly bad, but it's much, much more complicated than using one of the X libraries. I'd considered doing it in the past, but it's not worth it. I'm currently planning to replace the godawful fontconfig XML configuration on with a Scheme-based lookup system which may save my sanity, though.

--
Kris Maglione

It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something.  It develops
ideas.
        --Ken Thompson


Reply via email to