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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. "
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?
...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?
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