Slashdot Mirror
Fontconfig 2.0 Released
david_g writes "Keith Packard released version 2.0 of Fontconfig. Fontconfig is "a library for configuring and customizing font access". It can "discover new fonts when installed automatically, removing a common source of configuration problems", among other nifty functionalities. It comes with Xft2, and there are patches for GTK, Mozilla, and QT3 being readied. Another small step towards world domination..."
every font problem stems from one simple problem... People and programs throw fonts anywhere and everywhere...
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/ or wherever the Xfree86 people say then the problem is solved.. the font server can easily look for new fonts.
if you forced everyone to put fonts in
Linux and X suffer from the fact that too many people are allowed to do it their way... it's time to start forcing things to make simple things like fonts easier.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Though there are lots of reasons to add new interfaces, I find it inexcusable that XFree86 has not been fixed so that the old font interface draws the text anti-aliased.
Lot's of people then say "You don't understand X, it is impossible". But I do understand X. Yes, it will only work on trueColor. Yes, it probably needs to clip the antialiasing off at the edges of the glyph bounding box (I would enlarge the bounding box so this is not a problem). Yes, antialiasing will need to be turned off if they set Xor bitblt mode (I would ignore this problem, actually, nobody xor's fonts). Yes, it won't work with existing font servers. None of these are real problems.
The truth is that the innards of XFree86 are such a mess that nobody could figure out how to remove the 1-bit/pixel limitation from the pipeline between the font renderer and the screen. This is very sad and also indicates that X is very slow and bloated and that nobody will ever be able to fix it. It is also true that there is an incredible paranoia about back-compatability that must be overcome, in fact Linux's ability to ignore back-compatability somewhat is a big advantage over Windows.
I also want to point out that MicroSoft successfully updated their interface to use antialiasing, and they had all the same issues as X did. In case you forgot, originally Windows did not do antialiasing. They changed it and all the old programs started using it *without* being rewritten! The fact that X could not do this same sort of fix is far worse than the delay it has taken to get antialiasing.