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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. "
Err, actually I just had a look at XP's ClearType, and I think it's superior to the font anti-aliasing I've seen on XFree 4.2.x. Although they are a little bit *too* fuzzy.
Personally, I think the biggest problem other than ugly looking fonts in X is the fact that installing fonts requires one to restart X. Could someone explain to me why this necessary and why other X fonts servers haven't fixed this yet?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
One of the things that's always struck me about X is that the type rendering is poor, compared to the state-of-the-art rendering on contemporary commercial OSes. This has been true, in my personal comparisons, over many years. (I.e., as X advances, so does the state-of-the-art, making relative progress nil.)
I remember when I worked at Be, we licensed a renderer from Bitstream, specifically because writing a really good type renderer is exceptionally hard.
Perhaps this is an area where Open Source nees a leg up from a well-funded commercial outfit, like Sun. Can anyone comment on the actual quality of this new library, relative to existing solutions?
Why don't/won't they support the XRender extension?
Are the features available from STSF (which is under the BSD license) sufficiently better than what is available to warrant the work necessary for making the changeover?
...I would welcome some kind of change.
As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.
Havoc makes a good point:
You also still have to show the server-side stuff working with good performance and real-life significant memory savings.
But one can't put something to that test unless one develops it.
It basically comes down to: If a corporation is going to invest money in an open source development they are going to have some influence on how it's spent (in this case in terms of man hours). This influence may not be considered optimal to the other people in the movement, but it is Sun's money to spend.
And since I'm running RH 8.0, and OpenOffice, GIMP and AbiWord all have completely different font selections, I can't really see how it's going to get more fragmented.
Thank you for your efforts Sun Microsystems, I'm anxious to see the reuslts.
How open is Opentype?
Do not read this
FreeType is *very* good. With TrueType hinting enabled, the output on a standard resolution LCD is *dead identical* with the output for the Windows rasterizer.
Except no Linux distro can legally ship a product with TrueType hinting enabled. Apple has patents on TrueType hinting. So Linux fonts look worse than Windows fonts because of Apple. Ironic?
What's wrong with the kerning? Just look at "the" in the 20 pt Adobe Gill Sans line, comparing "th" to "he". There are problems like that throughout the 1st screenshot.
The 2nd shot featuring Konqueror is similarly disappointing. Just in the first paragraph - "Konquerer" and "filesystem" are all over the place.
Sure the antialiasing is pretty, but it's just tinsel on a withering christmas tree from the looks of things.
- HOORAY!
Are you really surprised that Havoc (Pango) and the Xft guy are pissed when their software is going to be replaced?
I seem to remember someone saying putting font rendering in on the client side was a hack caused by them not wanting to extend the X protocol. Sounds to me like Sun are doing it properly.
Oh, and the font rendering isn't tied into X so potentially all those separate ghostscript fonts could disappear.
Sig pending!
.NET, the new one on KDE look. I'm using it with the sharp corners option (thanks Clee :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's a mistake to think that there's a centralised standard font system on the other platforms. Windows and MacOS both offer at least two competely unrelated font systems: bitmap fonts and TrueType fonts. It gets worse once you delve into applications. Macintosh print shops use Type 1 fonts (Postscript) and you need to load the Adobe PS extension to use those fonts onscreen. CorelDRAW used to ship with their own vector fonts (Type 1 again?) and at the time they only worked inside CorelDRAW. AutoCAD still ships with its own font renderer on Windows (.FNT format?). And several applications I'm exposed to on Windows will only use .FON fonts; the font dialogs don't even offer the TrueType fonts.
The reality is that the other platforms are just as complicated as Linux/XFree86 w.r.t fonts. You've just been lucky because the application vendors have a lot of money and they've put a lot of effort into making everything "just work".
The other platforms and appications have also had a good 10 year headstart on Linux. You're complaining about the state of Linux Right Now. But I remember MS-DOS. I remember Windows 3.0. I remember that it wasn't all peaches and cream back then. I remember 4 competing widget sets with Windows 95 (Borland OWL, Win16, Win32, MFC) and none of them cooperated properly. Even cut and paste was a disaster back then.
So I guess my point is that Linux is better now than Windows was back then. Ok, sure, that's 8 years ago and it's not fair to compare Windows 8 years ago with Linux now. My point is not to denigrate Windows from 8 years ago; my point is that Linux is moving forwards. You don't go from zero to finished overnight. Linux started from way behind and is catching up nicely. Fonts right now are better than they were yesterday. Tomorrow they will be better again. In a short while I'm sure fonts on Linux will be on par with or better than the rest; because everything in Linux seems to work like that. Linux doesn't need to please you or me or "Joe Average". Linux gets better despite us. It doesn't need marketshare. It doesn't need to win a popularity contest. It will get better because people like to improve it. And Linux will win the "OS battle" precisely for that reason.