On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 02:20:47AM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:
On 1 Sep 2010, at 8:30 pm, Kris Maglione wrote:
On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 06:00:17PM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:
Connor Lane Smith wrote:
If someone were to write a simple clean xft patch for libdraw it
could be useful, perhaps even integrated into mainline.
This may just be my limited perspective, or it may be my upset
stomach talking, but I'm very surprised to see xft seriously
suggested in this mailing list. Xft is (to me) synonymous with the
transition of X.org from something bad but usable into a black box
nightmare best left to distro tools to cope with. Maybe it wasn't so
bad for other people, maybe it got better.
As bad as Xft/fontconfig is, the X font system is worse. At least with
Xft, you can copy just about any font you like (TTF, OTF, Type-1, PCF,
BDF) to ~/.fonts and then use it. You also don't need to worry about
having scaled bitmaps for every font size that you want. And, probably
most importantly, you don't need to deal with hoary and inscrutable X
font spec strings.
cd .fonts
mkfontdir
xset +fp ~/.fonts # or if you ran that already: xset fp rehash
Granted, xset not a wonderful program itself, being essentially a
multi-call binary with a number of entirely unrelated tasks and no
syntax consistency whatsoever.
Scaled bitmaps are an issue for the web, certainly. I've never
personally needed them elsewhere except in apps I'd really describe as
having brain-damaged UIs. I would like to have web pages rendered in such
a way as to not need precise font sizes.
You're not considering the fact that a) that won't work if
you're connecting over a network, b) you can't use scalable
fonts without a font server, c) quite a few other problems that
I can't think of off of the top of my head but bite from time to
time.
Speaking of UIs, good ones can make excellent tutorials. 10-20 minutes
with xfontsel and X font spec strings look a whole lot better. They may
still be a little hard to hand-edit but not entirely so and xfontsel
itself is a pretty good tool for when they are. After using xfontsel for
years the Gtk+2 font selector's lack of any means to filter the font list
was unbearable! Honestly, that lack of filtering was one of the bigger
things turning me off Xft, and I don't know if the situation's improved.
That's no excuse for the absolutely appalling specification
format. Fontconfig may be a reeking pile of insanity, but at
least you can read its specs. Usually a font name by itself is
enough, or with a size, 'Terminus - 12', and beyond that, it's
still easy enough to parse:
Terminus:style=Bold:pixelsize=12:charset=iso10646-1
as opposed to
-*-terminus-bold-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
Also note that the charset is almost entirely superfluous in the
first spec, but the second is a crap shoot without it.
And at least with the former you can run 'fc-list | grep Terminus'
to get a list of the available opts. Try grepping 'xlsfonts -l'
some time. On my machine, it freezes my X server for 30 seconds,
prints a few hundred lines to TTYv1, and finally returnes a few
hundred lines of similarly inscrutable font specs for each font.
I still say that fontconfig is crap, but it's certainly less
crap than the X font system, if only it weren't for the damned
XML configuration garbage.
I'm not really trying to advocate X font strings as such, nor Xlib; one
of my monitors really needs anti-aliasing and UTF-8 support is a good
thing, referring to your comment below. I'm not sure what I am getting
at.
I use Xft with wmii wihout antialiasing, because I do need UTF-8
support and the X font system doesn't get it right for me. And
I'm tired of dealing with those blighted font specs.
--
Kris Maglione
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to
change; the realist adjusts the sails.
--William Arthur Ward
