The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF

NoSun writes "Sun's latest project is to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf, that would replace Fontconfig and Xft2. But the big question is: Does the world need yet another X font library that would create more incompatibility and fragmentation? Well known Gnome and GTK+ developers are against this (yet another) X font library which just re-invents the wheel one more time with the result of slowing down KDE and Gnome in the desktop race. "

Comments

Re:Still inferior

[Fnkmaster]

This isn't quite so true anymore. The font rendering on a modern distro (I'm using Mandrake 9.1 right now) looks comparable to or better than the font rendering on my Windows box. At least, when it's using _good_ True Type fonts, anti-aliasing, hinting, and so forth enabled in FreeType. I've seen some intermittent kerning problems in slightly older versions of FreeType (like in Mandrake 9), but these appear to be largely resolved now. For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.

That being said, there is still a mess behind the scenes with font rendering. These non-TrueType legacy fonts sitting around should just go away. The frustration that sometimes, mystically, some fonts get anti-aliased and some don't - this isn't something end-users should have to deal with (and to the credit of the Mandrake people, I haven't yet seen any of these problems with the default fontconfig in 9.1). The real problem is the mixing together of all the "legacy" X11 fonts for old school X Windows apps with new TrueType fonts used in modern XRender/Xft apps. This creates a font management nightmare. What's worse is none of the font management programs make all this stuff crystal clear and usable, even for an experienced user.

So yes, font management is still a big thorn in the side of the X Window System, though it's much better now than it used to be, with Xft/XRender. I don't really see why we would do anything other than A) incrementally improve those and B) make the old rendering system OPTIONAL and try to get everything in modern Linux distros ported over to used the new X rendering infrastructure.

Rather than writing new font management subsystems for X, perhaps we should look for the longer term to alternatives to X, architectures that are cleaner for a desktop environment, where we can provide source-level compatibility for Qt and Gtk apps, and make the old X protocol a strap-on (like running an X server on a Windows box, or on Mac OS X), so that people who need to run legacy X apps can still do so, but that those who want a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-use desktop environment can get it.

Re:Still inferior

[cxvx]

Simply put I hate Sun and all their software products because they have REPEATABLY shown themselves to be the microsoft of unix-land.

You mean that microsoft has given things like NFS, Pam, Openoffice.org, Netbeans, ... to the community?
If only that were true, then we could use more "microsofts of the unix world" :)