On 6 Sep 2010, at 3:53 am, Kris Maglione wrote:
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.
a) Yeah, I guess you're right. There's a lot to be said for fonts
rendered by the application rather than by the display server.
b) I'm sure I used Type 1 scalable fonts. Then again perhaps that was
way back when I had xfs set up. I didn't like the Type 1 fonts, &
looking back that was probably due to the lack of any worthwhile
hinting whatsoever.
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
12-pixel terminus bold in a utf-8 encoding. I'd honestly rather read
the X font spec, the Xft style all seems to run together. Then again,
given a decent and decently-rendered font maybe the Xft spec strings
are readable. Seems a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with my eyes.
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.
Oh aye, xlsfonts -l does return a lot of junk, and holding up the X
server is nasty.
Regarding the XML configuration, would it help to convert it to YAML?
Just mentioning it because I've heard YAML is a lot more human-
readable than XML and XML can be converted to/from YAML.
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.
I've noticed how Plan's font system allows you to make a unicode font
by writing a text file referencing other fonts, and thought that was
light-years ahead of X fonts complete inability to do so. Are you
saying Xft can automatically fall back to other fonts for missing
characters? That would impress me.
--
Kris Maglione
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to
change; the realist adjusts the sails.
--William Arthur Ward
