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

Still inferior

[Drunken Coward]

The font rendering system in Windows is still vastly superior to any free implementation. Fragmentation will only further this problem.

Competition is a good thing, but in this case collaboration is even better. The more situations we have like this, the longer it will take for Linux to be ready for the desktop.

Re:Still inferior

[Mortice]

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.

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" :)

Re:Still inferior

[Malc]

Tell me about it. I can't even read the text used by the menus and dialogs in Open Office. I'm using Mandrake 8.1 upgraded to XFree86 4.3.0 with the MSFT TT core web fonts, QT 3.1.2 and KDE 3.1.1. I'm hoping the Open Office problems are problems with all the legacy crap floating around and can be easily fixed by editting the correct (which??) config file, because right now, the app is unusable. I find the font systems under X a little daunting and frustrating.

Even so, I would say my fonts still don't look as good under X as they do under Windows. For example (perhaps it's the font that my custom rolled Mozilla 1.3 with Xft is using, not the rendering component), I see capital S with the top part clipped and flattend, and lower case m looking more like rn. And there are other wierd looking spacing problems between other letters.

From what I read in somebody's comment on this site a while back (can anybody elaborate further?), it would seem that MSFT have some key patents on font rendering. Perhaps even that their hinting system disables anti-aliasing on vertical lines, etc, to aid with the clarity of the text.

Re:Still inferior

[vvikram]

firstly you dont qualify sir/mam. you aint in the category of a "joe user". you are ready to play around with font names , font dirs , x config files, truetype fonts etc right ?

and secondly, i call BULLSHIT. sorry for the harsh words. not directed at you. i just finished a fresh install of psyche and i use debian and other versions of linux on and off
daily and i think....

X SUCKS ASS.

believe me i cant stop laughing whenever i look
at X and whenever i hear people say things like
"too much eyecandy in XP and OSX". hello ? maybe
we are just trying a wee bit to justify the
defects in a system.i always tend to try to get the job done in the console....

lets look at the facts. randr in xfree86 4.x ?
crappy font management still in 4.x ? and suppose
one was to write a display system what CRITICAL features would they concentrate on other than the top two ?

frankly X is the biggest barrier to widespread linux usage. yes the new WM's are _AWESOME_, credit to the programmers but i think its in spite of X rather than anything else.

i also find it amusing that SUN is calling the shots on anything here. well maybe they think their contribution to the UI scene is important with their BRILLIANT [sarcasm] environment called CDE which i have used many a time and want to throw a brick at every single time.

anyway whatever. ANYTHING to make X development move is good. go for it.

keith works in the same company as me so call me biased but i hope he gets a free run, i think alan [cox] made a good pt in slashdot the other day that somebody or some people have to go out and make fast changes and try wild things to get X moving.

thanks. sorry for the length of the post.

vv

Re:Still inferior

[be-fan]

This is total bullshit. The guy knows nothing about Xft, Stsf, or FreeType.

1) 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. On a high-res LCD, any version of FreeType with the improved autohinters is also extremely good. I personally prefer it to ClearType's rendering, for two reasons: it doesn't require sub-pixel AA (which still causes visible color fringing in Cleartype) to look sharp, and letter shapes look more natural (less hinted, but still sharp). If you don't believe me, look at screenshots of my desktop: this and this.

2) Rendering quality has nothing to do with Xft vs Stsf. Neither of these font services do the actual rendering; that is still handled by FreeType. These services are for font finding and font matching.

Re:Still inferior

[DShard]

No, more like shared source as in Java, OpenOffice, etc. It bothers me that a company takes work that is done gratis by the community and then patents it to claim authorship. StarOffice is this. Java and it's extensions are this. I just distrust orginizations that act one way and say that it is something other than what it really is.

Re:Still inferior

[Entropy_ah]

Just out of curiosity what versions of windows are you using? The fonts in WindowsXP are absolutely amazing. Much better than those in Windows2k in my opinion. And much better than any fonts I have ever seen in X.

Re:Still inferior

[justsomebody]

Wouldn't agree. Small fonts on WinXP look blury on WinXP (at least on my notebook, and yes I tryed all types of font rendering on windows), while linux displays them clear. When you enlarge fonts on windows results get better, but fonts become too big

If it has come to some changes on XP I don't know, because it's a long time since I trashed them.

For what's on CRT I don't know, never tryed them. But I can tell RH makes rendering very clear on my 22".

Re:Still inferior

[Trolling4Dollars]

Actually, I am reminded of the state of fonts when I was using Windows 3.1 with regard to having more than one format. When I got my first PC, it had Windows 3.1 on it. Since I planned to be a professional desktop publisher at the time, I new that TrueType fonts were inferior for professional publications. So, I purchased some Adobe fonts and installed the Adoby Type Manager. This worked great for my printing, but made things kind of weird with regard to the rest of the system.

In XFree86, I think it WOULD be a good idea of a set of defacto TrueType fonts were packaged with X. I think I remembered hearing that there were copyright problems or something... which is why we don't have a native TrueType font pack or software for easily creating TrueType fonts in Linux. But, the point is that SOMETHING needs to be done about the basic set of fonts that X comes with.

As far as the potential conflict between the two projects, I say "let the best man win". Sometimes, you are never going to get past the arguing about which approach is better and you just wind up talking and never doing. If either project winds up with something inferior, it will be dropped in a second by most users and distros. So let's have at it and get some work done!

Re:Still inferior

[Fnkmaster]

I generally agree with you on the X sucks ass front, but a lot of this is the fault of the distros that fail to package things together nicely. I agree, the X infrastructure _should_ be replaced, and while I admire Keith's efforts to fix it in the short term, I think a real architectural rethinking is necessary (which is what I suggested in my post). The problem is the XFree86 group seems hopelessly attached to a shitty codebase, and a dying window system architecture based on the fundamentally wrong idea of separating "policy" from everything else (sorry, I know some people don't like it when this gets said, but it's true - Windows is a very successful desktop OS, as is Mac OS (relative to Linux) and they both do lots of policy dictation. In fact, the biggest criticism of Windows that keeps Mac users on their Mac hardware is that there isn't enough policy dictation in Windows.

Despite all of this, I encourage you to check out Mandrake 9.1, and pop in the texstar RPMs (which should be part of the standard distro). The Liquid Style running in KDE 3.1 on Mandrake 9.1 looks truly beautiful, comparable in eye candy quality to Windows and OS X, and this setup performs pretty well on my old PIII 700 with an old school GeForce 256. Of course, the X window repainting is still frustratingly slower than it is on Windows with similar amounts of eye candy, even on the same hardware, and that shouldn't be an issue with even this level of hardware, though it's not TERRIBLE with the Nvidia binary drivers.

Re:Still inferior

[unixbob]

whatchoo been smokin?

OpenOffice is based on StarOffice which was a commercial product. Java is a program language designed and built by Sun Microsystems.

In what way is that "a company takes work that is done gratis by the community and then patents it to claim authorship"? Perhaps you should check your facts before posting

Re:Still inferior

[Fnkmaster]

I wish I could show you a screenshot of my current KDE 3.1 desktop on Mandrake 9.1 with the Liquid Style. Perhaps Liquid is a bit too much of an OS X knockoff for my tastes, but the effects and eye candy (real menu transparency, etc.) are beautiful, and the font rendering (using the MSFonts pack from texstar, again, you have to go to texstar to get the good addons for Mandrake), it looks great. And I didn't do any nose-to-the-monitor tweaking, I just added two or three RPMs from texstar to a stock Mandrake 9.1 distro (and installed the NVidia binary drivers), and this desktop looks great.

And my primary desktop system is a Windows XP box, with a Viewsonic VA800 17.4" LCD screen, so I definitely appreciate the quality of font rendering in WinXP fully, but I'm amazed by what a good job this Linux box is doing, even looking at it side-by-side with my WinXP box.

Re:Still inferior

[spells]

Java? I agree that some of the extensions have been developed under the JCP but I was under the impression that James Gosling and his team at Sun created Java. Am I misinformed?

Re:Still inferior

[leviramsey]

Despite all of this, I encourage you to check out Mandrake 9.1, and pop in the texstar RPMs (which should be part of the standard distro)

The main reason that Texstar's RPMs aren't in the main distro is that he refuses to do the work necessary to integrate them into the distro, and in some cases, is actually hostile to integrating them into the distro. It's all a stunt to draw hits to his web page imho.

Besides which, I wouldn't trust Texstar to package anything of any importance. My few experiences of his complete and total lack of packaging skills have forever damaged his name in my book.

Re:Still inferior

[Fnkmaster]

I really recommend doing a full upgrade to 9.1 then. It uses the latest FreeType, comes with a pre-rolled Xft-enabled Mozilla 1.3, XFree86 4.3, and you can get all the addons (hacked FreeType with "patent-be-damned" features enabled, MSFonts RPM, etc.) from Texstar's RPM archive (which you can add easily to your urpmi media list for dumb-easy updating).

All the "clipped font rendering" issues (like your clipped S and so forth) that I had with my older Mandrake 9 installation are finally gone with my current 9.1 install, and I finally feel comfortable enough looking at the fonts that I can imagine using this desktop a significant part of my day. And some of the KDE 3.1.1 styles (like liquid) have some truly slick eye candy to them. The big problem remaining here is X's window redraw speed when you move windows around and the like. Some have claimed that the 2.5.x Linux kernels fix this with some changes to timing or interrupt parameters to make a more "desktop-friendly" kernel (like that magic constant you used to be able to tweak in the kernel to get a much more responsive desktop). Of course, the distros should have been doing this all along to make a real out-of-the-box desktop GUI experience that works and feels qualitatively fast on all modern hardware. Until they get that working, Linux just ain't going to be ready for the desktop.

Re:Still inferior

[juhaz]

StarOffice was created by Star Division, a company, not community. It was free as in beer, and only after sun bought stardivision for about 73 million dollars and _gave_ away the source that became OpenOffice the community has done anything about it.

<sarcasm>Very greedy indeed. Always sucks to see this happen. And curse those damned Netscape folks too that had the nerve to do about same and give away their Navigator sources so it might become Mozilla.</sarcasm>

And Sun very much developed Java themselves. They've probably been including some community work into later versions, but isn't it good that useful libraries get incorporated into base distribution so everyone can use them?

Re:Still inferior

[Webmonger]

Actually, there's some merit to the poster's Java statement. Sun once claimed to have written Blackdown's JDK 1.2.2 port.

Re:Still inferior

[mindriot]

Hmm... yes, the font rendering in X might be good. But what the Linux world really is missing is a centralized, standard font system for all applications. I can certainly enjoy nice on-screen fonts. But try writing a document using the app of your choice, and then printing it. OpenOffice is on the right way (at least it manages to use TrueType fonts to print correct PostScript documents). But currenty it's a real pain to be able to pick any font on the system by its unique name, and then go and use this same font for on-screen rendering and printing. While it might be possible to make this work, it's a pain to do that. Just think about the mess of directories on your system that contain fonts. On my Debian Testing box, there's /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, and there's /usr/share/fonts; and to be able to use my TrueType fonts in OpenOffice, I have them all in $HOME/.openoffice/1.0.1/user/fonts. A software using these TT fonts to print will most likely have to embed the font data. It can not refer to the font name in PostScript as it can in X. Where is that a problem? Last time I tried, when I wanted to use a vector graphics program (sketch, kontour, ...) and write some text using my installed fonts, I would be disappointed as soon as it came to printing. So either it didn't work, or it was just way too much of a hassle to make work.

That being said, here comes the disclaimer :-) I might be wrong on how printing and X fonts interoperate... but I would definitely be interested in a way to set up proper font handling (as good as it gets) that does not cause as much confusion.

Oh, and then on Debian there's defoma... what does that do? For me (<- dumb user in this respect ;-)) it seems to make it all even more complicated...

Re:Still inferior

[DShard]

Is it good to incorporate community work that is useful into core products, yes. Is it good that they later patent it, no.

Re:Still inferior

[JJahn]

I agree, getting the fonts in X to look great is a nightmare, BUT it can be done. I have fonts in Gentoo running a LOT nicer then the ones in Windows, and not just some of them, all of my fonts look great.

A few things to try:

-Get MS's webfonts if you don't already, you might hate MS but they are still good looking fonts.

-Try turning off the bytecode interpreter in freetype. Not going to explain how to do that here, just search.

-I don't have any more because turning off the bytecode interpreter fixed the problems for me.

Re:Still inferior

[unixbob]

to quote jrwilk01,

The Blackdown folks did release their code back to Sun you know. And, the Blackdown project is not an open source project, they license the reference implementation of the JDK from Sun and modify it to run on Linux. Thats why its called the "Java Linux Porting project".

Re:Still inferior

[JJahn]

Adding something... I have a 1.2 ghz T'bird athlon, 512 ram and a radeon 8500. I'd call that a mid level system, not incredibly fast but still reasonbly fast in games. I never noticed any speed issues on my system, not with the latest X and KDE...running the Liquid interface and all the eye candy turned on. Although I use Gentoo and started from stage1, so everything is pretty optimized :)

Re:Still inferior

[DShard]

from sun themselves

Q: What were the hottest issues to resolve?

Deutsch: They were much the same issues that other standards committees are facing with the same difficulty: intellectual property and patent rights.

You've probably seen lots of accounts in the press over the last year, about standards organizations struggling to come to agreement on intellectual property -- and patents in particular. We were no different. Those were the topics that became very intense for all of us. In fact, they became so intense, that at some point the business representatives started having their lawyers join in on the conference calls.

At various times the lawyers fielded their own calls, as well as joining us in our regular ad hoc teleconferences. This was necessary because we were trying to answer some very complex legal questions about intellectual property and patents that frankly hadn't been addressed by many other collegial forums -- hot issues that evoke some very strongly held and generally conflicting opinions.

This seems to me to be them talking about using community developed standards and calling them theirs.

You are correct that Java was built in-house with prior art being to numerous to bother listing. I am usually not a M$ mouthpiece but at least the released the VM specification and C# language specification over to SOME standards body. Java is not free, it's definition is not free and neither is code posted on their own developer forum by individuals who do not work for Sun.

Re:Still inferior

[Baki]

Without SUN UNIX would have vanished into insignificance a long time ago (well, maybe AIX would be prevalent as a UNIX variant, ugh).

Now, after years of UNIX survival thanks to SUN, in which time they gave away lots of stuff, protocols and specs such as NFS and NIS, sponsored TCL for a while, "gave" us Java, Linux might be mature enough to take over the low end UNIX market. The high end market, which is taking share away from mainframes these days is still far out of reach, and Solaris is virtually unchallenged.

How can you be so ignorant to "hate" them. Without SUN there would be no alternative to MSFT, Sun is the only steadfast challenger and never got into dubious deals with the "enemy" (as did IBM and HP for example).

As any big corporation they may have done some strange and hard to understand things sometimes, but Suns leadership and value for the vitality of the UNIX world cannot be denied, they are the only ones 100% committed without compromise. They deserve lots of respect for that.

Re:Still inferior

[Malc]

Thanks for the advice! I don't think an upgrade will be easy though as I have compiled from source many things.

I've been using Mandrake from the 6.0 days, and to be frank, I am rather fed-up with their upgrade cycle. I run Debian on a server and absolutely love it. It just works. It takes little effort. Once Debian Sarge (testing) has completed the move to gcc 3.2, I will try it out under VMWare and if I like it, I will ditch my Mandrake system in favour of it. I don't need a bleeding edge system like the Mandrake team aims for - it causes too many issues for my likes. Compare it to Windows: I installed Win2K three years ago, and it's still going strong. It will be useful for a few more years too. Sure, I have to apply patches regularly, but that's easy and doesn't seem to break very often (read: never on this machine, and once on my old laptop). This is an upgrade cycle that I am most comfortable with! Most Linux distros don't seem to support anything more than a year old, which is quite frustrating :(

Re:Still inferior

[Webmonger]

Open Source projects care about placing credit where it's due. Licenses like the BSD and GPL insist that copyright notices be preserved. Blackdown may not have been open source, but it was a volunteer project-- all they could hope for was credit. And after the outcry, Sun started giving them credit.

Sun's licensing scheme is called "community source", but you don't have much of a community if you start claiming you wrote everything the rest of the community wrote.

Re:Still inferior

[DShard]

Sun has never been a competitor to M$ in the OS space. Microsoft sells software for commodity hardware, period. Sun sells software that runs on their own hardware (yes I know they have solaris for x86). Ignorant is believing that they single handedly stop microsoft from taking over everything. If you think that large companies purchase software from only single vendors, it just doesn't happen.

Sun did no more keep Unix alive then IBM, HP, Silicon Graphics, or Next (Apple). Microsoft, Sun and every other company are not the enemy, they bring money into the US economy. That's a good thing.

I don't hate all their products, just their software policy which resembles M$, Novell, CA, etc.

Re:Still inferior

[Mitchell Mebane]

WHOA. Those shots look frikkin' awesome! What are you using? I'm using Gentoo, and while my fonts look nice (better than WinXP, IMO), those are just...astounding! My only problem with fonts is OpenOffice.org does it's own font stuff, which looks like crap, and Mozilla, which looks like crap as well.

Re:Still inferior

[Trolling4Dollars]

I still have yet to understand what kind of problems people have with X! It seems to work fine from my perspective. And no... I'm not using twm and a few xterms. I am an eye-candy addict, so I've been bouncing around between the Enlightenment wm, KDE and GNOME. So far, I've seen NONE of the issues that people seem to complain about. X is snappy, and as of RedHat 8, looks just as good as Windows with the exception of a few apps that don't take advantage of the nicely rendered fonts in X. I haven't seen any kind of performance problems and I tend to run more than one X server on the same machine, at one time. the people who say X "looks ancient" either don't know how to use X, or are thinking about what it looked like in 1997. The support for video cards is very nice, and ever since X went modular in it's 4.0 series, it's been incredibly flexible. About the only other issue I can see has nothing to do with X's performance, but has everything to do with the development of X. I echoed Alan Cox's statment in the last discussion. Yes... something "wild" does need to be done to get development on X going. I think a lot of the problems are probably caused by the fact that the CODE is incredibly dense and is not written in a way that people used to writing GNU software are accustomed to. ON that front... yes X does have problems.

Re:Still inferior

[mickwd]

"It's all a stunt to draw hits to his web page imho."

Jesus, I've heard of people doing some stupid things just to attract visitors to their web sites, but making dozens and dozens of high-quality, up-to-date RPMs for downloading onto a selection of distributions (but usually favouring Mandrake) over a long period of time sounds like a hard way to do it.

Especially considering the RPMs are stored on ibiblio.org, and "his" (shared) web forum is somewhere completely different.

Sounds like you're talking bull to me.

My many experiences of his packaging skills have caused me to thank him for doing so much good work for Mandrake (and other distro) users, and providing it for free.

Once again, thanks Texstar.

Re:Still inferior

[Fnord]

Sun didn't do CDE. They actually resisted it to the bitter end, pushing their OpenView environment over it, until they finally gave in only to have CDE be declared unuseable. Mind you, OpenView was even worse, but that's beside the point. CDE's failings were purely thanks to design by committee.

Re:Still inferior

[spitzak]

I have written toolkits that are portable to Windows and I must point out that your claims that "policy" is why Windows look nicer are wrong. I can make a program that completely ignores every GUI guideline and "consistency" requirement in the world, and it will still look nicer on Windows, because I can do a call that take a single string name of a font to GDI32, and then I can draw any string, and I am absolutely 100% guaranteed that the user will see nicely-rendered letters. Nice fonts have absolutely ZERO to do with that "consistent user interface" and "policy" and everything to do with the developers scrapping some back compatability and writing actualy hard code to do the job.

Unfortunately the fact that X sucks is being used to force very bad ideas (such as toolkits in the server) that would condemn Linux to being totally unable to compete with any platform that allows innovation in the user interface.

What X needs is easy to program for and advanced rendering capabilities. I can draw a damn button, what I can't draw right now is UTF-8 text. Programmers using "consistency" as an excuse to force people to use their own implementation of a button, rather than getting to work on hard stuff like rendering, are causing more damage to Linux (and Windows, too!) than anything.

Re:Still inferior

[cpeterso]

what KDE theme are you using? The design is pretty cool.

Re:Still inferior

[fault0]

Cleartype looks like shit with CRT monitors. It was developed for LCD monitors. Assuming that you have one, have you tried enabling a form of sub-pixel hinting under XFree 4.2, whether it be RGB, BGR, or the vertical variations of such. These are, like cleartype, meant for usage on LCD monitors.

Re:Still inferior

[fault0]

Yes, those indeed look very nice. What fonts are you using?

Re:Still inferior

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Still inferior

[Enahs]

I'm sorry, but I come from the print world and when I hear "non-TrueType should just go away" I get the urge to get out a baseball bat.

Just because the available libs antialias TrueType fonts nicely doesn't mean that TrueType is vastly superior. Quite frankly, TrueType is vastly inferior to Postscript.

Re:Still inferior

[illumin8]

Your screenshots look awesome! What distro are you running? Are you running a highly customized debian distro or something? Anyway, if it's not too complicated, I'd love to know how you got KDE and Kword to look so good.

Re:Still inferior

[Enahs]

believe me i cant stop laughing whenever i look at X and whenever i hear people say things like "too much eyecandy in XP and OSX". hello ? maybe we are just trying a wee bit to justify the defects in a system.i always tend to try to get the job done in the console....

I work on a Jaguar box 40hrs./wk and I can honestly say there's too much fucking eyecandy. OK?

Maybe Apple should stop thinking about things like alpha-channel-friendly themes, windows that twist themselves into funny shapes when they're minimized, bouncing icons, etc. and more on things like, oh, say, a Finder that doesn't suck. Those are the things I get the most complaints about when I try to help people move from 9 to X; people don't like the stuff like the bouncing icons, and think that (and I agree) that Finder is vastly inferior to Finder in 9.

I'm forced to work with Macs and Windows machines; I come home to *n?x boxes running X. I fail to see how letting a WM warp and twist windows all out of proportion during minimization, as well as translucent windows/titlebars, increases productivity.

Re:Still inferior

[Trolling4Dollars]

Hehehehe... silly troll, everyone knows that professional technical publications back then were done on PCs. No Macs could deal with the CAD/CAM files that were designed on the PC. I did quite a lot of work for the Eaton Corporation.

Re:Still inferior

[SewersOfRivendell]

You say that like those technologies are accomplishments to be proud of. Perhaps OpenOffice is, I've not used it, but I've used the others, and I'm always left wondering with Sun technologies -- didn't anyone at Sun ever take a basic CS course? Now, you certainly could celebrate Sun for Java and almost single-handedly keeping the Unix flame alive between '85 and '94. But NFS before version 4 is a total disaster...

Re:Still inferior

[Mitchell Mebane]

Thanks - I'll try that.

Also, someone mentioned here that the font problems with OO.o should be fixed in 1.1.

Re:Still inferior

[shellbeach]

Just out of curiosity what versions of windows are you using?

Just out of curiosity, but what versions of linux are you using?? :)

Seriously, these gripes about font rendering in X have not existed for at least six months. XFT2 and xfreetype >= 2.1.3 make for extremely easy configuration and some very, very convincing font rendering from where I'm typing! And if you want a stock-standard release to judge for yourself, try looking at the xft-enabled mozilla in the latest version (3.2) of Knoppix - the fonts are far superior to any fonts I've ever seen on WinXP.

That's not to say that X doesn't have its problems, but AFAICS X is substantially ahead of Windows in the area of font rendering. (I haven't used MacOS X so can't comment about that)

Re:Still inferior

[Fnkmaster]

Well, I respectfully disagree. I think you and I basically see eye to eye on the idea of being able to make higher-level GUI API calls, and _presumably_, also having a higher-level protocol for communications between the "client" and "server" (or application and windowing system to get away from X terminology). We are in 100% agreement that a programmer should ALWAYS make an API call that says "render string 'foo' at location bar", rather than say "retrieve font bitmap foo, now do some internal font rendering in client, transmit back bitmap baz to server..." or whatever the hell goes in with the old school X infrastructure.

XRender seemed to greatly improve font output quality in X. And I understand it, XRender and the Xft extensions basically do exactly what we both agree should have been done. In other words, it's already there. For example, Xft has the API call:

void XftDrawStringUtf8 (XftDraw *d, XftColor *color, XftFont *font, int x, int y, XftChar8 *string, int len);

Clearly this DOES let you draw a UTF-8 string on a button pretty damned easily. Now where we disagree is whether this is "good enough". I judge this based on opening up my KDE desktop and looking at the apps that I want to use. Evolution (which is better than Kmail), Phoenix, OpenOffice - shit, these are all Gtk applications. Oh wait, you mean Gtk apps don't look right with my KDE desktop? Separate themes, different theming functions (which I can't for the life of me figure out how to access without having Gnome on my machine). This is a nightmare.

Face it. Windows at least strongly suggests policy for everything. You can always go and roll your own in Windows too. But all the normal desktop apps have consistent colors, toolbar structure, use the same fonts, render them through the same system, and so on. If everybody used Gtk or if everybody used Qt, I suppose there wouldn't be a problem, but they don't. I don't like people "innovating" with new GUI toolkits. If you need to create a custom widget for a specific app, fine, but I want one set of menus, one set of text drawing functions, etc.

Perhaps it could be solved by a common theming system and some basic shared libraries that are developed cooperatively between Qt and Gtk so that they can still "innovate" separately all they want, but keep some of these basic functions consistent to guarantee a common look and feel without having to play ridiculous games looking for themes like BlueCurve specifically designed to look alike on both systems.

Re:Still inferior

[shellbeach]

OMG - an informed, intelligent opinion, and you even provide evidence to support your claim?? What on earth are you doing reading slashdot???

Thank you for taking the time to make screenshots and prove how utterly stupid and ill-informed most of the posters in this thread are.

(Although you might be interested to know that you actually are using MS-cleartype-style sub-pixel aa (which X does very well) in your second screenshot - just use xmag and you'll see. My guess is that your gripes with ClearType come from MS using the wrong model with your screen: RGB instead of BGR, perhaps?)

Re:Still inferior

[walt-sjc]

Yeah, and he sure as hell did not read any of the docs at stsf sourceforge. There is a good side-by-side comparison of xft2 and stsf.

It's quite interesting, and stsf looks like it may have certain advantages over xft2. xft2 for example does not do layout - that's an application thing (gnome uses pango according to the doc) and stsf DOES do layout. According to sun, stsf has a 30-200% performance improvement over xft2.

stsf does NOT solve all the problems with X fonts however. They are still a god awful mess in regards to configuration.

Re:Still inferior

[Commutative Monoid]

You do know what ClearType is, right? Fire up gnome-font-properties and tell me the equivalent of "ClearType." If you can't, stop.

Re:Still inferior

[be-fan]

.NET, the new one on KDE look. I'm using it with the sharp corners option (thanks Clee :)

Re:Still inferior

[be-fan]

Real funny. The shots aren't rigged. I'm running 1600x1200!

Re:Still inferior

[Spy Hunter]

Fontconfig is the solution you are looking for. Fontconfig is a new, standard system for programs to access fonts (for both X and printing). As soon as applications are updated to use it, problems with different applications finding different fonts will go away permanently.

Re:Still inferior

[iabervon]

If only there were a function like Xutf8DrawString that would draw a UTF-8 string available if X_HAVE_UTF8_STRING were defined, along with a function like Xutf8TextExtents, and so forth...

Er, right. If only there were a function like XftDrawStringUtf8...

Er, right. Actually, programmers have been working on what you want. The programmers who matter for these purposes haven't been implementing buttons. Of course, the documentation, standardization, and popularization of this work has somewhat lagged, but UTF-8 string rendering has been supported by XFree86 since 4.0.2

Re:Still inferior

[13Echo]

Your problem is a result of the embedded Freetype libs in OpenOffice. You can force it to link to your system's libs, but it isn't perfect. Unfortunately, nobody can legally include the Freetype autohinter in their software because Apple owns a patent on the method for rendering the fonts.

Re:Still inferior

[13Echo]

It must have been a long time since you've seen X, then.

X Fonts.

Actually, this doesn't do it justice. Freetype is actively being developed and better improved for LCD displays and subpixel hinting. Subpixel hinting on X, on an LCD, rivels OS X... And it certainly tops Windows XP.

Re:Still inferior

[13Echo]

You make a claim then pipe off a disclaimer that says you might be full of it? Weird.

Well, there is a standard. It's fontconfig and it uses libfreetype w/xrender for antialiasing. It's used in virtually all X programs now.

Re:Still inferior

[nathanh]

Hmm... yes, the font rendering in X might be good. But what the Linux world really is missing is a centralized, standard font system for all applications. I can certainly enjoy nice on-screen fonts. But try writing a document using the app of your choice, and then printing it. OpenOffice is on the right way (at least it manages to use TrueType fonts to print correct PostScript documents).

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.

Re:Still inferior

[mixmasta]

Hmm, that shot looks very nice, and I've heard many people say that this looks better than XP and I just don't agree.

I use Cleartype subpixel rendering on a DVI flatscreen, and it is just gorgeous.

It isn't a blurry anti-aliasing as far as I can tell, it just increases the resolution 3xish.

My Browser Shot

Re:Still inferior

[Malc]

Although far from ideal, I found a solution.

Re:Still inferior

[nr]

BRILLIANT [sarcasm] environment called CDE which i have used many a time and want to throw a brick at every single time.

Stupid ignorant troll, check your facts before you spew lies around.

Sun did not invent CDE, they just licensed the sourcecode from OpenGroup just like HP, IBM, SGI and alot of other vendors.

Re:Still inferior

[nr]

Simply put I hate Sun and all their software products

Duh you dont know much about history do you, without Sun there would not be much of UNIX today. They have been one of the few companies that have keept UNIX viable since the eighties and been driving down the costs of UNIX machines so even smaller companies and schools/universities could aford UNIX.

I doubt there would be much Linux today if Torvalds did not have the opportunity to access to Sun UNIX workstations and servers at school.

If you are against Sun you also are againt the global UNIX/Linux movement.

Re:Still inferior

[Knuckles]

It bothers me that a company takes work that is done gratis by the community and then patents it to claim authorship. StarOffice is this.

Bull. Sun bought StarOffice from the German company StarDivision, improved it, gave it as a gift to the community and in return bases its future StarOffice version on the OO code. Sounds like fair deal to me. Java is another matter, but then, they wrote it and it's theirs and they can do whatever they want with it.

Re:Still inferior

[Per Wigren]

Make sure you have gtk2 in your USE-flag and recompile Mozilla 1.3.1-r1 (r1 fixed some bad gtk2-bugs)

Re:Still inferior

[Bert64]

Download john the ripper (www.openwall.com) and compile it first with the generic target, second with the generic-x86 and third with x86-mmx and perform benchmarks.
Reading those benchmarks will show you the benefits of optimization, the mmx version is over 500% faster on my athlon system, and the generic C version is still somewhat slower than the x86 hand optimized one, so clearly compilers have a way to go still.
Aside from anything else, its likely that your debian box is compiled with gcc 2.95.3, a somewhat older and proven to generate slower code, than the gcc 3.2 used by gentoo.
As gcc improves so the optimization difference will too, binaries targetting a 386 will never take advantage of mmx, sse, 3dnow etc... Do you think intel/amd were on crack when they created these extensions? If they werent going to provide some performance benefit, there would have been absoloutely no point including them, and restricting yourself to backwards compatible binaries means you cant take advantage of these features without bloated fat binaries.

Some optimizations are tradeoffs, most often in compile time, some such as the gcc flag -fomit-frame-pointer make debugging somewhat more difficult, but if you intend to USE a program rather than debug it, it seems worthwhile. -ffast-math cuts a few corners to speed up floating point math, which works fine in most programs because they dont require the full ieee spec precision. However many optimizations are not tradeoffs, different processors have different execution patterns, they execute different instructions at different speeds, can process multiple instructions at once, have pipelines of various lengths and caches of various sizes. If you take these all into account, the compiler can do it`s best to ensure there are the minimum number of cache misses, pipeline stalls and NOP`s fed through other execution units.
The only reason the differences are not much larger, is because x86 cpu`s are designed heavily with backwards compatibility in mind, mainly because most of these chips spend their whole lives running old code.

Re:Still inferior

[be-fan]

Let me clarify this. I'm running at 1600x1200 on a 15" screen. That works out to 133 dpi. I have X set to scale fonts exactly for 133 DPI. So all my fonts are exactly the size indicated -- 12 point is 12/72 = 1/6 of an inch high. I know this may be hard for Windows (96 DPI is the only resolution that exists) but in *real* OSs, fonts sizes are resolution independent.

Re:Still inferior

[elmegil]

But NFS before version 4 is a total disaster...

As someone who used NFS almost from its inception, I can assure you it was not a total disaster. It made possible a large number of things that would have been impossible with RFS, the only competing standard of the day.

Unless of course you mean the LINUX implementation of NFS, which it would be silly to blame Sun for; all early Linux NFS' were completely incompatable with anything else I could see.

Re:Still inferior

[Haeleth]

"The people who say X "looks ancient" either don't know how to use X..."

That is precisely the problem. To install a font in Windows, you drag it into the 'fonts' folder, and immediately it is available in every application and renders perfectly in all of them. To get a Truetype font installed in X at all requires skill; to get it rendering nicely requires expertise. Some of us prefer the operating system where it all works out of the box - even if that means sacrificing power and flexibility.

Re:Still inferior

[Haeleth]

That's nonsense. In Windows 2000, Start->Settings->Control Panel->Display->Settings->Advanced...->Gener al has an option which allows you to set the font resolution to anything from 19 to 480 dpi. The option has existed since Win95 at least.

I run Windows with fonts at 133 dpi myself. There are a few issues with poorly coded applications sizing dialog boxes in pixels, but X has some pretty ugly applications as well.

restarting X

[carpe_noctem]

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?

Re:restarting X

[jandrese]

Huh, wha? What ever happened to your little buddy xset fp rehash?

I don't think you have to restart with Xft either, although I havn't had an opportunity to install a font under it yet.

Re:restarting X

[Jeffrey Baker]

Ignorance strikes again. It is not necessary, just add a font to the fontconfig directory (~/.fonts, for a user), and the font will be available via fontconfig/xft2. For core fonts you need xset fp rehash. In no case do you need to restart the XFree86 server.

Re:restarting X

[Narchie Troll]

With fontconfig and the newer versions of XFree86, you can simply drop a font into a directory and use it in applications.

Re:restarting X

[carpe_noctem]

ok, flame on. =) I forgot about the xset fp rehash. doh!

Re:restarting X

[orpheus2000]

Others have pointed out the xset command to refresh the core font cache, but this only affects new applications, so in a typical (i.e. real world setup) X session, applications like the KDE and GNOME panel, if affected by the font change would have to be restarted. How does one do this? Either by killing the proc and having it respawn or, more likely for a non-power user, restart X!

Re:restarting X

[Keebler71]

I forget, is this thread about how much better Linux is than windows? In windows you just drag and drop the font into the Fonts folder of the control panel. If it is confusing amoung Linux users, it is just more proof that Linux will never be mainstream, despite its being superior at certain tasks.

Re:restarting X

[Jeffrey Baker]

In GNOME you just drag and drop the font into the fonts folder in Nautilus. Big deal.

Re:restarting X

[platypus]

I'd guess the cause of this difference might be lying deep inside some kernel/vfs(?) functions windows has, and linux (2.4.19 IIRC) has not.

In windows, there's this function which can be used to register for a directory change (don't know how it's called), and not-brand-new kernel versions don't have that.
So, when some core libraries come around using this function, there should be a non hackish way to automatically register fonts when they are dropped into a directory.

That's just me guessing.

Re:restarting X

[juhaz]

He just said all you need to do is add a file into .fonts.

So please tell how, exactly, it is harder to drag and drop a file into ~/.fonts in graphical file manager than to so the very same, except that the directory happens to be 'control panel\Fonts'?

For most systems, latter is actually %SystemRoot%\Fonts, is there any way in windows for user without permissions to write on system folders to have their own non-systemwide fonts? Not flaming, I just want to know.

Re:restarting X

[Doug Neal]

KDE and GNOME both have capable utilities for installing and previewing fonts graphically.

Re:restarting X

[Keebler71]

The difference is that my mother and grandmother both can add fonts in windows, but can't in linux. On a side note, this is a good example of how delusional linux users are... they really believe that linux is as easy to use as windows. I won't argue that linux is more stable or configurable but useable? Give me a break.

Re:restarting X

[juhaz]

Maybe if you'd bother reading the damn comment you'd notice there is no difference between the two methods I described. Neither did I made any claims it was more useable, less useable or anything else about useability in general. In this one specific respect with a new enough version it is one hundred percent equal. Dragging a file into directory is done the same way, whether it happens in Nautilus, Konqueror or Explorer.

Or are you claiming there is some supernatural entity at work, affecting only Linux users, that makes your grandmother and mother to lose their ability to point a mouse cursor on top of an icon, push and hold button, move the cursor again, and release button when it's on top of another icon? Because it's still how it works with both fontconfig enabled apps (the user, of course, doesn't have to know anything about fontconfig and all, new distributions support it out of the box) and windows.

Or are you just trolling?

Re:restarting X

[dh003i]

Easy to learn != Easy to use (n/t)

Re:restarting X

[ubernostrum]

In windows you just drag and drop the font into the Fonts folder of the control panel.

I don't know about your Linux distros, but in Red Hat you just drag and drop the file into ~/.fonts. No muss, not fuss. Now, what were you sayign again?

Ironic...

[duffbeer703]

Is it just me, or is it somewhat amusing that the authors of a bloated CORBA graphics framework like GNOME are complaining about re-inventing the wheel or performance sacrifices?

Wasn't the GNOME project the outraged response of the GNU crowd to KDE?

The one thing that all large open-source projects have in common is a bunch of prima donnas running the show.

Re:Ironic...

[SpamJunkie]

The one thing that all large open-source projects have in common is a bunch of prima donnas running the show.

That's true for more than open-source projects. You've just discovered this trait of star programmers? You must be a contractor or something. Every large closed source project I've worked on has been the same.

I know, I've run the show on a few of them.

Re:Ironic...

[Skeezix]

What are you talking about? Bloated CORBA graphics framework?

Re:Ironic...

[duffbeer703]

From the horses mouth:
http://www.gnome.org/intro/findout.html:

"GNOME is chock-full of cutting edge technologies. Network transparent component technology using CORBA, extensive use of XML, and one of the most advanced imaging models on any platform are only some of the features that makes GNOME the closest to rocket science you're likely to run on your desktop. In addition, it's all implemented in extremely efficient C, which makes it fast, lean, and very portable."

Re:Ironic...

[IamTheRealMike]

CORBA graphics? You're thinking of fresco.

Not that it'd matter performance wise anyway. Bonobo/ORBit is many times faster than DCOP.

Re:Ironic...

[Skeezix]

Yes, I'm very familiar with GNOME, and that statement on the gnome.org website. I was asking you what the hell you meant. The phrase "bloated CORBA graphics framework" has absolutely nothing to do with what GNOME is.

Re:Ironic...

[jensend]

That establishes that Gnome uses CORBA, which everybody knew. It does not establish that Gnome is bloated, which it isn't. Sure, Gnome is hard to build, has a weird network of dependencies, hasn't yet included c++ bindings by default, and has a community which often seems to believe that everybody is either an absolute newbie who has no idea what goes on with this magical beige box they just bought or an elite hacker- such complaints are legit- but Gnome is not bloated. [Gnome did have some bloat problems around 1.4- when people were trying to fit programs and libraries into it which were at the time big, ambitious, and buggy (nautilus, evolution, etc, etc).]

Furthermore, Gnome was not an "enraged response". Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena worked on Gnome before they knew anything about KDE or its licensing issues. A lot of Gnome's support near the beginning was the result of KDE's licensing issues, though- and that's why GNOME has been neck-and-neck with KDE despite KDE's 1 year head start.

As to the licensing issues- back in the bad old days, QT couldn't be linked to GPL'd software without infringing on the terms of the GPL. Now open source software can link to the Unix version of QT without any legal problems. However, it's still illegal to use the Mac or Win32 native versions of QT with GPL'd software.

The other part of the issue now is that you can't use QT for software under a non-GPL-compliant license without paying Trolltech. A lot of trolls on Slashdot say that it's ironic that people who favor GTK cite this reason now- "QT used to be too proprietary for them, now QT/Free is too free for them- you just can't please em'!" However, this is not the case. Most of the people backing GTK are interested in there being a toolkit people can choose no matter what license they use- a toolkit people can standardise on. The natural choice of license for such a toolkit is the LGPL.

Re:Ironic...

[nitehorse]

Oh?

Do you have specific benchmarks, or real data to back this up? I'm kinda curious, because I was under the impression that the only thing limiting DCOP's speed was ICE on X11 (libICE specifically). Do you have any links?

Re:Ironic...

[21mhz]

DCOP uses ICE. DCOP is bound to X11. DCOP has lost.

It's even more ironic that both KDE and GNOME developers are now pondering something called D-BUS that is presented as "ICE that does not suck."

Re:Ironic...

[nitehorse]

What?

DCOP hasn't lost. It's still insanely useful for IPC and offers that IPC to users in ways that it's never been possible to use before.

Even if the backend for DCOP gets ripped out and replaced with D-BUS, DCOP hasn't lost, just gotten better. Since you haven't bothered to answer the question either, I'm going to assume that Mike was just trolling. The entire reason that we WROTE DCOP was because CORBA was ridiculously slow.

Slow to grok, slow to compile, and even slower to run. CORBA has plenty of neato advantages and features, but speed has never been one of them. DCOP was conceived to be a fast lightweight IPC mechanism for X-based desktops.

DCOP is no more bound to X11 than KDE or Konqueror[1] is. The only reason it was bound to it is because the message-passing backend was implemented using libICE - but that backend can be ripped out and replaced, say with D-BUS, and no applications will even need to be recompiled.

-clee

[1]: Note that Konqueror runs on the Linux framebuffer, and KHTML itself has been ported to a few non-X11 systems such as AtheOS/Syllable and MacOS X. Qt runs on Windows and MacOS X in addition to X11 desktops.

Re:Ironic...

[21mhz]

The entire reason that we WROTE DCOP was because CORBA was ridiculously slow.

As opposed to writing a better ORB because existing ORBs at the moment were ridiculously slow.

Last I heard, GNOME now enjoys interoperability with the Java2 stock ORB, practically for naught.

Re:Ironic...

[nitehorse]

The difference is that we didn't write an ORB, because we didn't need CORBA. We wrote DCOP because we needed lightweight, fast IPC, which was only one of the many features of CORBA - and on a desktop, you won't be using most of the features of CORBA.

And what exactly is the benefit of having interoperability with the stock Java ORB in GNOME? What does that provide to the end-user? What components are being implemented in the Java ORB that are useful to us users?

Re:Ironic...

[21mhz]

And what exactly is the benefit of having interoperability with the stock Java ORB in GNOME?

You never know... May it be pulling Bonobo components from Eclipse plugins?

Mightn't this be a good thing?

[Alderete]

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?

Re:Mightn't this be a good thing?

[JanneM]

A leg up isn't sufficient. Problem is, a lot of technologies in the font rendering area are patented. For instance, there is no _really_ good hinting engine enabled for truetype fonts, simply because it's patent ecumbered and would require licence fees for every desktop using it. That is not to say a hinting engine isn't available, just that it's not compiled in...

Re:Mightn't this be a good thing?

[be-fan]

From all indications, it appears that stsf uses FreeType as a backend renderer. FreeType, in recent versions (2.1.3, 2.1.4) is extremely good. Have you taken a look at it lately?

Competition

[Zugot]

Is this competition the push that makes everything better? Imagine where KDE and Gnome would be today if the other wasn't around? Imagine all the features that wouldn't be in your favorite Linux or *BSD distro if there was no competition.

I am all for this. If Sun identified and added features that were missing from Xft2, that would be a benefit for all.

XFT2 needs the XRender XFree86 extension ...

[burgburgburg]

in order to run fast enough, but Sun and other non-XFree86 X11 implementations don't support this extension?

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?

Re:XFT2 needs the XRender XFree86 extension ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Solaris 2.9 does come with the XRENDER extension.

Unfortunately it does not work.

The real underlying problem (for Sun) is that the XRENDER extension requires 32-bit frame buffers. Sun's (at least most of their) frame buffers support 8 bits and 24 bits and maybe 1 bit. Sun's bogus XRENDER probably exists in order to please {Star,Open}Office which may only need the 8-bit part.

Sun could probably upgrade the frame buffer drivers, but it is not clear that deployed cards have that extra 33% memory lying around. (For PC users that probably sounds so 1980-ish. Sorry, but that's the world on Sun.)

Re:XFT2 needs the XRender XFree86 extension ...

[21mhz]

I'm pretty sure that the 24-bit cards don't support alpha blending in hardware. This means XRENDER ops must be done in software, making the bitdepth issue irrelevant.

Re:XFT2 needs the XRender XFree86 extension ...

[schweikert]

The latest update to Solaris 9 (12/02) does support XRender in the standard X-Server. See the release notes: http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/816-7173/6md6rliq8?a=vi ew

Re:XFT2 needs the XRender XFree86 extension ...

[spitzak]

The problem is not that 24 or 32 bit hardware is needed, but that a "true color" visual is needed. A "true color visual" is where it is possible to calculate a resulting color quickly and easily from the value of a pixel in the frame buffer (which could be as small as 6 bits or 1), an incoming pixel (which can be much larger like 16 bits per component, or smaller, than the pixels in the frame buffer), and an incoming alpha value.

What this definately means is that it cannot happen in color-mapped mode, because the calculation produces an arbitrary resulting color. Finding the nearest match in a colormap is slow, and if the assignment of the color map is under program control and thus can change, is actually impossible.

It also means that the output is poor (but not impossible) on displays with few bits per pixel. A cheap algorithim would look posterized, or have really bad dithering (like Windows on an 8-bit card). Good algorithims (random error diffusion) look ok but require so much computing power that you might as well pay for more memory per pixel. Because of this most people say that it requires N bits per pixel, but that is not really true.

The problem with X is that it's horrid interface meant that huge numbers of programs are written to require colormapped mode. Fortunately almost all Linux software has been rewritten to avoid this, but Sun still has this as a problem. Windows did not have this problem because they added a "draw in this color" interface that worked even when you were in colormapped mode, so most programs work without it (some programs did not for the same reason X programs did not, but on X programs were *forced* to require colormaps).

Hello, logic?

[Anonymous Coward]

- If Sun's project is vastly inferior, no one will use it and it won't cause "fragmentation".

- If Sun's project is vastly *superior*, then the people who switch to it will enjoy a great implementation. You shouldn't force Sun to collaborate in this case. Mozart's compositions wouldn't be as good if he had been forced to "collaborate" with the inferior composers of his time.

- It's only if Sun's project is "comparable" to previous projects that it will cause fragmentation.

Re:Hello, logic?

[DShard]

I appreciate the thought, but I argue only the point that Mozart's composition would be better or worse since that could be highly subjective. If the same type of criteria are used to judge "quality" of Sun's efforts or the effort's of the open source community, I would not be able to devine the difference.

Re:Hello, logic?

[Mr. McGibby]

huh? What's your point?

Re:Hello, logic?

[mrmag00]

the best man will win the race.

Re:Hello, logic?

[Hard_Code]

You are not accounting for momentum and entrenchment. Sun has to be absolutely amazingly better to lure people away from perhaps a mediocre, but working-right-now solution. It's always been this way, which is sort of unfortunate. (I don't want to bash Xft2 folks, I'm just saying that superiority does not always win the day in technology)

change.

[Vodak]

Change for the sake of change in a stupid thing, if it improved the X Windows System I'm all for it.

On the other hand this infighting is hurting all the *NIXs. If the development of the GUI system is stopped because of this stupuid crap we will never see commercail quality entertinament titles relased on the *NIXs. and it wouldn't matter how nice KDE/Gnome look if you can't bring in the gamers tio the desktop market Linux people are looking to take from Microsoft.

Name change?

[Quixote]

to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf,

Maybe they should rename it to stfu...

Baa--dum! Thank you.. I'll be here all weekend.

Competition is good

[Jeffrey Baker]

If Sun's SFST can be better, I'm all for it. Fontconfig/Xft/Xrender has a slight problem of being extremely academic. They authors are quite interested in tackling polygon intersection corner cases, but are apparently not interested in practical problems like gamma correction. The latter results in the terrible white-on-black rendering found in the present XFree86.

Possibly competition will help both project move along faster.

Since it currently sucks...

[Art Popp]

...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.

Re:Since it currently sucks...

[dominator]

Actually, Gimp and AbiWord use FontConfig/Xft2 either directly or indirectly (read: transparently) now, as can any GTK2 application. I suggest you go get gimp 1.3.12 and AbiWord 1.1.4. Ximian's OpenOffice will use Xft2/Fontconfig as well. Expect that to be released _soon_

Having worked on these projects, I know all too well how bad it was. The font situation *was* deeply fragmented. Fontconfig made it all better. Let's not make it suck again. IMO, Sun would do better to simply support the Render extension on their XServers, or to improve the X backend to Xft2. It *can* be done. I'm dreading Sun's results. I'm afraid they've just made a lot more work for all of the users and hackers out there.

Dom

BSD licensed?

[grub]

Interesting to note that it's released under the BSD license. Are they hoping that arch-rivals such as Microsoft adopt the product or are they just thinking that it won't take off?

Re:BSD licensed?

[The Ape With No Name]

Now this is a great troll. A classic. I'll bite!

How on earth can the application of the BSD license indicate that Sun doesn't think the product will take off? Personally, I think BSD is a more flexible license than the GPL. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Re:BSD licensed?

[Z4rd0Z]

No, they probably just want it to have the same license as the rest of X. "But X uses the MIT license!", you say. Go compare the BSD and MIT licenses. They are almost the exact same thing. But then, you knew that, didn't you?

Gnome developers to Sun

[painehope]

stfu about stsf...

Re:The crappiest thing in OSS.

[Narchie Troll]

Just a small question -- when's the last time you dealt with fonts in XFree? What version? Have you used FontConfig?

State of the Art

[tjwhaynes]

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.

20 minutes with hindsight? Ok - here is the state of the art.

1. Open your .fonts directory in your home directory.
2. Drop your new fonts in there
3. ....
4. errr
5. ...
6. That's it.

That requires fontconfig on your machine, but I don't see how it can get much easier.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

P.S. Of course, the documentation needs to be better promoted.

Re:State of the Art

[Grandpa Jive]

Its too bad that GTK 1, which stable versions of the gimp is based off of, doesn't support XFT/Fontconfig. So your solution is invalid, unfortunately.

This is opensource, don't fight framentation

[rkt]

Linux exists because of framentation. remember the famous "linux is obsolete" thread ?
Now, if work on linux had stopped, it wouldnt be where it is today. You cant assume that every fragmentation is bad.

XFree86 Using Bugzilla

[RadioheadKid]

A little off topic but still of interest, the XFree86 project is now using Bugzilla which sounds like a step in the right direction.

Skipping X

[G3ckoG33k]

Here is a suggestion on how to skip the dependency on X, altogether, using Qt embedded.

Question...

[Trashman]

How open is Opentype?

Re:Question...

[Mortice]

Hmm, I navigated through Adobe's appallingly designed website to no avail, but this talks about some TrueType patents which are apparently applicable to OpenType as well.

But did you really expect anything with Microsoft involved in it to live up to the name 'Open'?

Re:Question...

[Bert64]

Well their security track record leaves their customers very much open.

For those of you who couldn't (or didn't want to)

[XaXXon]

read the middle paragraph, here it is in *ENGLISH*

The people who built the first Motif Font architecture didn't know squat about what they where doing, even measured on a pixelfont level. They might as well ... have stuck... to the console. We'd be better off today without it!
The whole current setup that just barely manages, made up of a bazzilion tidbits from xft ftx sftsxftftxsxstfts bitstreams ftfi (praise them!!!), Motif *shatonscreen* pixelfonts, KDEs fontrendering (finally from engineers with more than just a spinal column to think with - hooray!) and whatnot is so utterly bizzare it makes MS fdisk look like the reference in usability and software design.

Stsf: because Xft2 doesn't use enough buzzwords

[iabervon]

From Sun's side-by-side comparison, it seems like Xft2 is a carefully designed project taking into account the needs of application designers to reach a clearly defined goal, whereas Stsf is has vaguely-defined and excuses its unjustified design with a lot of buzzwords.

Xft2 is slightly inferior in that it doesn't have a way of communicating the data to the server pre-rasterization, so that the server can use hardware acceleration in the rendering process. Of course, there's no particular reason that, once XRENDER is complete, this couldn't be done.

Sun fonts vs. OSS fonts

[lindsayt]

I don't know much about this whole thing. All I know is that I use a Sun for my desktop instead of my RedHat 7.3 box precisely because Sun's fonts are so much better than the ones in RedHat 7.3. Fonts in Solaris are substantially comparable to those in Windows, whereas those in Red Hat still lag behind.

Whether this has any bearing on the specific issue of XFT2 vs. STSF, I don't know. Perhaps the proposed STSF doesn't even resemble the font set in Solaris, and perhaps my RedHat font issues have nothing to do with XFT2. But regardless, I use Solaris on my desktop for font reasons, and I'm more likely to trust Sun's fonts than OSS ones simply because of my prior experience.

Of course sometimes prior experience can cause people to be stubborn, ignorant and misinformed. I'll hope that's not the case here...

Re:Sun fonts vs. OSS fonts

[jimand]

have you tried the MS TT fonts here?

Re:Sun fonts vs. OSS fonts

[IamTheRealMike]

I think most people aren't sure what STSF does.... it doesn't render fonts, it isn't a collection of fonts, so it'll make little difference to how the desktop looks. It is more comparable to Pango, as it performs internationlized text rendering and reflow/layout.

Re:Sun fonts vs. OSS fonts

[ubernostrum]

All I know is that I use a Sun for my desktop instead of my RedHat 7.3 box precisely because Sun's fonts are so much better than the ones in RedHat 7.3.

I don't know, man . . . the fonts on my RH9 beta box look a heck of a lot better than the fonts on my Solaris 3 box. Or maybe I shouldn't compare a current release of one OS with an older release of another?

Re:Sun fonts vs. OSS fonts

[lindsayt]

I would argue that Red Hat 7.3 *is* a current release of red hat as much as my Solaris 2.8 install is a current release of Solaris. Both are currently supported, both are one generation back from the newest, and both are still actively developed. That seems an awful lot like a comparison of a current product with a current product. Besides, I haven't noticed any significant improvements in font rendering in either Redhat 8.0 vs. Redhat 7.3 or Solaris 2.9 vs. Solaris 2.8.

Oh, and there never was such a thing as Solaris 3.

Re:Sun fonts vs. OSS fonts

[ubernostrum]

Well now, that's odd. It seemed to me that Red Hat 8's font rendering was light-years ahead of 7.3's. The anti-aliasing out of the box is a very nice thing, and some of the sub-pixel AA stuff that can be done now is just as good as Windows' ClearType, IMO.

And as for "current" = "supported", I'd have to disagree. The 1.0 Linux kernel is still "supported"; does that mean it's fair to compare its feature set with, say, the XP kernel as "two current OS kernels"? True, 7.3 is probably the most stable "recent" release of Red Hat out there right now; the box I'm typing this on is still on 7.2, because it was rock-solid and I don't yet need all the eye candy of 8. But given the impending release of Red Hat 9, and the impending EOL of the 7.x series, I don't think it's fair to talk about it as if it were the latest and greatest release. Window NT 4 is still in use, but it's been EOL'd by MS; would you have considered it "current" up until the time support was cut off?

Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun ruins everything

First they fucked up gnome.
I actually LIKED gnome 1.4, but when kde 3.0 came out it sent it to it's grave. The bastardised gnome 2.0 was a joke thanks to sun.

Then they gave us openoffice. Their bloatware is worse than microsoft! 78 megs download compared to just 15 for koffice or 12 for abiword.

Now they want to fuck up our fonts too? Fontconfig/xft2 is good enough already. Please tell sun to shove it and go back to cde on slowlaris. (and rewrite slowlaris in java too).

Re:Sun

[Kourino]

Hmph. It's pretty obvious why this is posted AC, I know I wouldn't be proud of this :3

Do you realize that you just pointed out that abiword, a word processor, is almost as large as the entirety of koffice?

Do you realize that, as a part of KDE, koffice takes advantage of a lot of backend that doesn't exist for, say, Abiword or OpenOffice.org?

Do you realize that there are actually developers on the GNOME project that have no relation to Sun whatsoever?

By the way, constant use of "Slowlaris" is pretty much as bad as "MS$" or "Winblows". and when I see "M$" ...

Re:Sun

[jensend]

OpenOffice is a lot bigger than Abiword- but this piece of arguably-bloatware is not "worse than microsoft". MS Office 2K is a fair bit bigger than OpenOffice 1, and while I'm pretty sure MS Office XP is considerably bigger than MS Office 2K, Openoffice is working hard to reduce its code size. Comparing Openoffice to Abiword or koffice is rather unfair- neither Abiword nor koffice are within an order of magnitude of the featureset and complexity of openoffice.

My guess would also be that you've had a messed up gnome 2 installation or that the things you missed in gnome 2 were due to Metacity being the new default WM. Just switch back to sawfish and you've got all the config options you loved from the 1.4 days as well as the extremely improved performance of the Gnome 2 platform (going from the nautilus included in Gnome 1.4 to the latest nautilus ought to especially be an eye-opener- the version shipped with Gnome 2.0 was a heck of a lot faster than that in 1.4, and the latest version is a good deal faster than that).

That sounds cool, how does it really work?

[OwnerOfWhinyCat]

I'm running RH 8.0, and although there is a .font-cache-1 file in my home directory, there is no .fonts directory.
locate .fonts
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/README.fonts
.fonts.cache-1
$
The readme is a 1029 line file detailing how to add new fonts. But it makes no reference to the .fonts directory in my home directory?
Is there really any easier way?

Re:That sounds cool, how does it really work?

[tjwhaynes]

If you are missing a .fonts directory, just create one:

mkdir ~/.fonts

Fontconfig keeps tabs on what is happening to the font directories it is monitoring and updates the X server lists as appropriate. All the other directories it monitors by default are only accessible by the superuser but you can add your own personal fonts to your own .fonts directory and fontconfig will pick up the new entries. If you ever get stuck and you think that fontconfig is missing some entries it should have seen, you can run fc-cache to regenerate the cache files. fc-list will tell you what is currently available via fontconfig.

If you want to know more about the fonts on your Gnome 2 system, I also recommend installing Fontilus for Nautilus which supports access to fonts via the fonts:/// virtual directory. It also allows you to query font files on your file system.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Ok, fixed the fonts

[duck_prime]

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. [...] For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.

So we've got the fonts looking nice on Slashdot. Will somebody now please fix the content?

Sheesh.

How this troll got Informative is beyond me

[21mhz]

To everyone moderating the parent as Informative and Insightful: lay your crack aside.

Graphics and CORBA are independent parts of the GNOME platform, that aren't necessarily used together.
That, and other claims in the parent comment, are just rehashed old trolls. Move on.

The practicality side...

[moriya]

On one end, you have stsf. On the other, you have Xft2/fontconfig. Both have their strenghts. Both have their weaknesses. But the question I have on the stsf side is: does it make configuring X for fonts better than Xft2/fontconfig?

Xft2 uses a simple XML configuration file that tells us what directories are housing fonts. This is a good thing, as it makes font configurations easier. Add that the system is also capable of manipulating the basic presets so that those with an obscure setting can still use it. This is something that XFree86 isn't capable of unless one wants to tinker around with the old archaic XftConfig file that requires super-user access to change its settings.

Big change isn't good. However, I'm fine with stsf as long as it doesn't break anything. If it does, something needs to be done. And with the recent removal of KP from the core team, am I the only one who has a odd feeling that the XFree86 team will remove Xft2 as well?

just do this and that, and BAM!

[OwnerOfWhinyCat]

Thanks, I'll play with that. That sounds much better than the methods suggested in the README.

Re:gtk has sucky use of xft2 anyway

[diamondc]

Yes, this sucks. At least you can specify the font in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (gtk-font-name = "Arial 11") to keep regular gtk2 programs consistant with gnome ones.

Examples?

[siskbc]

I'm with some of the other responders in this thread. I want to see some of these patent examples where they tried to patent open source work. Preferably ones that weren't a bureaucratic oversight that was reversed.

One already exists of course.....

[IamTheRealMike]

One issue I think a lot of posters here are missing is that fontconfig and the rest are already deployed and working, whereas STSF isn't even completely implemented yet.

That means STSF doesn't have to be just a little bit better, it has to be VASTLY better to justify ripping out a brand new font architecture. Nobody is convinced it is.

Other people seem to be of the belief that having 2 competing font systems is ok. It's not - this is two competing interfaces, NOT implementations. Well, STSF can apparently emulate Xft, but you don't get any advantages that way, so what's the point?

So STSF had better be pretty amazing to justify it. Sure, Sun can go and use it if they like, but it'd require major b0rkage of GTK, and those patches would probably not make it back into the trunk, so they'd have basically forked GTK. Not good.

Re:One already exists of course.....

[vanye]

>> Other people seem to be of the belief that having 2 competing font systems is ok. It's not - this is two competing interfaces.

s/font systems/desktops/

I suppose we should pick one of GNOME/KDE and kill the other then...

Re:One already exists of course.....

[IamTheRealMike]

You're confusing user interface with machine interface. The same word is used to describe two different concepts, confusing I agree.

Re:One already exists of course.....

[Jimithing DMB]

Right, because you know how an application written for GNOME compiles and links against the KDE libraries.

Re:One already exists of course.....

[iabervon]

In particular, STSF would have to offer something to application writers in order to justify switching to a new API.

What Sun should be working on is making an implementation of Xft which rendered the text on the server side without requiring any change to applications. This is what STSF should be, and would enable hardware acceleration of font drawing, which is the only advantage (aside from a lot of buzzwords and the letter 'S') that STSF seems to have.

Re:gtk has sucky use of xft2 anyway

[IamTheRealMike]

The problem is that GTK can't depend on GConf, so it reads its font configuration from a text file. When you're running GNOME though, users and developers want to take advantage of the general coolness of gconf, so they communicate via a hacked up X protocol called XSETTINGS, hence the fact that gconf controls the GTK font size (and KDE could do so as well if it wanted to).

That problem won't go away until there's a neutral, acceptable to all configuration system that GTK can depend on.

Respect where respect is due

[puppetluva]

Sun deserves respect and attention when it comes to server reliability. . . we should give them their due.

When it comes to their insisting they should be heard re: desktop usability and XWindows performance. . . we should give them the finger.

Sun and other committee members managed to take great ideas from HP (Openview) flush them down the toilet along with a commitee of other buffoons and then come up with CDE -- A lowest-common-denominator utter failure of a desktop. Now their trying to do the same with Gnome and X-Standards. . . forget it.

As far as Sun playing coordinator between X.org and XFree86. . . XFree86 _IS_ X now (yeah there are a few commercial guys - they'd be nowhere without XFree86 doing all the font work etc, ). If Sun had been paying attention to X over the past 8 years they would have known that X.org's attempts to commercialize X almost killed it and XFree86 brought it back from the dead with the free software stuff. Sun OWES XFree86 for the fact that X has moved at all. . . not the other way around.

Message to Sun: 1) work WITH the free community - especially if you want to use its desktop managers. You are no longer the authority and your credibility on the desktop has long been squandered. 2) work WITH the free community if their J2EE servers are some of the most deployed implementations YOUR standard. they are keeping your standards growing. 3) work WITH the free community if you are going to sell your own linux distro(LX50) instead of selling a weak/hobbled/over-priced version to make Solaris look good (it only makes you look like you can't configure linux right, btw). Figure it out or you will increasingly be replaced BY the free community.

Sun's arrogance is infuriating and counter-productive. I've been a big fan of their engineering and it is truly a strength, but the boys in executive better start reading periodicals labelled "2003" and earning their keep, or Sun is going to bite it.

Who cares about fonts? - X needs the fix.

[AtomicX]

The problem isn't the fonts or various bits and bobs here and there - the problem is that X itself is a complete and utter piece of shite. It was written a long time ago and it is time to scrap X entirely and rewrite it from the ground up with:

- Full integrated OpenGL rendering support
- ClearType
- It needs to be much faster ... need I say more.

Sure these are available via add-ons in the vast majority of cases, but it isn't neat and the system wasn't designed with that flexibility in mind. It would be much tidier if these were all integrated into the re-designed "kernel" of X.

woah major misread

[TheKubrix]

RTFM vs STFU

Re:Obviously Sun is wrong

[andrewski]

So we should force bitmapped fonts to live in small, inefficient agricultural communities, or else we send them to Siberia? Or perhaps we should kidnap some Japanese people and force them to write a decent rendering engine!

Why and old distro is a happy day.

[SomeOtherGuy]

Try crawling through the internals of any recent "desktop" distro to find all the different font solutions working "together" to render your desktop apps and X window system, and you will soon find that no two applications seem to use the same solution. Even better yet try turning them all of for a sanity check. Anti alias this, font config that, it's a mess. Maybe no one will agree with me -- but I spent a month wondering why one application looked fine, and another looked pukey, and another looked like it would never render anything above 7 pixels. 500+ fonts installed -- and no single application could use more than a handful of them. And no two applications across graphics libraries (gtk1, gtk2, gtk2 antialias, qt, qt anti alias, etc.) seemed to use the same handful. I finally decided to go back to the days where applications just used the default font server provided by launching Xwindow. I downloaded the "ancient" xfstt and imported my favorite TT Fonts -- and I was up and running with Debian stable. The only problem I have now is trying to get slightly newer verisons of some of my apps.....Some of this stuff in Debian stable are stuck in the point release my Grandfather used in his day.

Re:Why and old distro is a happy day.

[SomeOtherGuy]

Yep. I am glad I was not the only one to notice.

Well, let's face it.

[mindstrm]

X *is* fragmented, so is the unix desktop world.. and it's not going to change.

Now, that doesn't mean there aren't good desktops...
KDE is fantastic.. and gnome is getting really good too.

I guess the point is.. if you look at modern linux based systems now... they are in many ways totally different operating environments, at least insofar as the average desktop user is concerned.

Mandrake has it's thing; Redhat has it's thing; Debian has it's thing kinda..... we aren't talking about a single system.. so let's not pretend that new stuff isn't good.

If a new font system is available, and it's cool, and Mandrake wants to use it, great. If not, great. Same for everyone else. IT's stilly to debate whether or note "yet another something or other" is good or bad; thoes that are good and people want end up being used. Those that fail, fail.. and in the end, we have better stuff.

Eh?

[number]

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.

Too many combinations 'n permutations

[mabhatter654]

The commmunity needs to get things to be horizontally or vertically compatible but not necessarily both!

In general there are too many choices, and worse combinations of choices, for a newbie user--and before you flame, remember even if you use XXXdistro that they've made a lot of choices for you by removing things they don't agree with. New font systems won't fix the problem, new X won't fix it either!

What's needed is a step back from the problem and address the real issue: DATA! All is data!

The very first thing to determine in any great improvement of Linux is universal data types then implementation takes care of itself! [look at the web for success] Fonts, spreadsheets, documents, and lots of other apps need to be reduced to data types first. As much programming as possible should be reduced to scripting [ala perl, python] or JIT [Java, Basic] that would again, turn programs into data, managed like data, and portable like data.

Untill that happens, things will remain horribly fragmented, but the markets will determine a useable and effective system anyway. It won't be as efficent as it could be though:(

Comparison seems valid to me

[zmower]

The OS news article links to a PDF file. Quick summary: They have a replacement for the Freetype lib so no apps have to be rewritten. 30% speed increase. It reads like a fair comparison to me.

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.

Re:Comparison seems valid to me

[Spy Hunter]

Your summary is wrong. They don't replace Freetype, in fact they USE it to rasterize all their fonts. They replace XFT, and can replace fontconfig too. They can also use fontconfig if necessary. Their claims of a speed increase seem bogus to me. In one paragraph they claim 30%, in another they claim 200%. 30% not spectacular, and will probably disappear as XFT/Render continue to improve, and I doubt the 200% figure is correct. In fact they seem to state in the PDF that the XFT approach has the potential to be faster since it uses fewer round-trips, and the only reason STSF is faster now is that it has been heavily optimized. Client side fonts are not a hack and have many advantages. Fontconfig also isn't tied into X so ghostscript could use it as well. It sounds to me like Sun is creating a big monolithic API that is more complex than what people actually want to use in reality, while XFT is listening to exactly what application developers want and implementing it. I don't like the idea of implementing yet another server. More servers = more stuff to go wrong. Font servers are the way of the past. Also, I don't like the idea of creating another specialized X extension, when Render works just fine and is more general.

Re:Comparison seems valid to me

[CaptnMArk]

One thing that FSFT can do is share fonts between applications. This can lead to faster application startup and less memory usage (The unix way is to run more simpler apps instead of windows style bloated monsters).

As I'd someday like to run each mozilla window in it's own process (better isolation), this seems like a good feature.

Re:Comparison seems valid to me

[Spy Hunter]

XFT also shares fonts between applications. XFT just doesn't share fonts between X servers. Your separate mozilla processes running locally on your linux box would share all their fonts. If you had two remote x displays running two copies of mozilla from your linux box, then both copies would have to rasterize and send their fonts to the remote servers. However, I don't see how this is that much of a disadvantage. In STSF's case, both X servers would still have to recieve the fonts over the network, they would just come from your linux box's STSF server. The only savings would be in the rasterizing process. However, since XFT uses a server-side cache, rasterizing will only have to be done once per server per font, no matter how many clients use the font. Since usually a small number of fonts are actually used in day-to-day usage of a terminal, the probability of a cache hit is high, and rasterizing will only need to be done rarely.

STSF can also share fonts between X servers that happen to be running on the same machine, unlike XFT. To me this seems like they are really reaching to find a disadvantage to XFT. It is pretty rare for more than one or two X servers to be running on the same machine. It never happens on any system I've ever used, and it doesn't make any difference to the Linux desktop market. The only situation where this would make a difference is the situation where you have a huge box with like 10 video cards, and 10 connected keyboards and mice, all running separate X servers that different people are using simultaneously. I have never heard of anything like this but I suppose it would be possible. In this case XFT's memory usage would be 10 times the memory usage of STSF. But who cares? That is totally the wrong way to use X anyway! X's philosophy is that multiple displays should be behind a network connection, not local. X should be used with multiple thin clients and a few fat servers, not one giant monolithic machine.

A refreshingly sickening dose of optimism

[donscarletti]

I think you might be getting a little melodramatic with your predictions of a forked GTK

STSF is either a replacement to XFT2 or pango (the gtk font layout library). If it is a replacement for XFT2 then it would not contact GTK at all, let alone change it enough to mean a fork. If it replaces pango, that would be a little more tricky, as pango direct contacts GTK, however the speed of Gnome portage to STSF would suggest that if it is a replacement to pango, the api is very similar and the only thing needed would be a few #ifdefs to iron over a few idosyncracys in the two apis.

To me it makes no difference, I write my programs in GTK, I do not touch the internals of X. Most of GTKs developers could claim similar. The UIs are made up of layers upon layers of libraries, only one of these layers would need to be rewritten, hopefully it will be a small one.

Don't get me wrong, I hate division, if I had the choice I would distroy this new standard, then I would force QT, TCL, Java, even Xaw to be displayed through GTK, then I would merge the BSDs, and send in the SA to beat up the XFree86 until they all get along, I would force everyone to drive on the left hand side of the road, GSM would reign supreme, I would make all those weird IBM mainframes use ASCII, I would see DVD+RW was adopted universally or ELSE, MSOffice files would be replaced by a real XML based format, ANYONE that mentioned "HTML 5" would be pronounced an enemy of the people and sent to the Gulag without trial. But I can't, I don't have that power, I don't even have a dictatorial mustache and a sad thing is that even though some people do have mustaches, nobody has the power to tell OSS developers what to do and nobody ever will.

All one has to do is remain positive, cope with the split, not get too passionant about one side or another and hope that one dissapears, hopefully within a year all the new #ifdefs in the code will become nothing but reminants of a time forgotten and we shall live happely with our finely rendered fonts and the victorious font management library shall remain buried and hidden down deep in X. Eventualy our grandchildren shall come and ask us what library was chosen, looking down at their fresh faces that have never been furroughed with the anguish of having to use windows, we will realise that we don't even remember.

Sun's linux distro

[klaricmn]

How is this impacted by Sun's choice to drop it's linux distro? I assume not at all, but I'm not sure. Can the project stay afloat without Sun's support?

Re:Sun's linux distro

[acoopersmith]

STSF was started at Sun long before Sun Linux, and is not at all dependent on Sun Linux to continue development. Sun still sells desktop computers, running Solaris and eventually Linux as well, and STSF is developed to support them.

How come metafont is not used more?

[Chemisor]

I keep wondering why the metafont engine is used only by TeX and nobody else. In my opinion it is a much more elegant system than truetype. Is there some reason why it has not caught on?

Was that your contribution?

[A nonymous Coward]

If so, please continue, as lame as it was, it did make a difference ...

Three more years!

[Jordy]

Three more years until two of the three main Apple patents that cover hinting go away.

Three more long years. It actually might be 6 more years, but I'm not sure if that patent term extension from 17 to 20 years is retroactive or not.

To be honest though, I haven't heard of Apple suing anyone for infringing on that particular patent and I imagine quite a few people have.

STSF is technically superior to Xft/Xft2/XRender

[jeske]

Even though they both can use FreeType as a rendering engine, these two APIs do not have the same rendering capabilities.

Below I've listed several reasons that STSF is technically superior to Xft/Xft2. In addition, STSF is compatible with Xft, meaning that existing Xft applications to not have to be changed unless they want to use advanced STSF features which Xft does not provide.

1. STSF supports non-rectilinear text, including text along shaped paths. Xft/Xft2/Pango, even with XRender, does not.

   When you consider that drawing through Xlib or XRender must use rectangular blocks, you will realize how hard it will be for client-side font rendering to ever efficiently support non-rectilinear text.

2. STSF has higher performance rendering than Xft/Xft2.

   Graphics systems typically accelerate font rendering by caching unique rendered glyphs in video memory. With client-side rendering of glyphs, several applications cannot share the same rendered glyphs. The more applications you run on the machine, the more copies of the Arial 10pt letter "L" you will have.

   Another benefit of server-side rendering is better networked graphics performance. I constantly hear Linux/X developers defending X's network model over Windows' direct rendering model. Xft does not work well over a network, and Xft2/XRender have limitations over a network which are not present in STSF. As display dot-pitch increases this will only get worse for Xft.

3. STSF can be made to render fonts for older applications using core X protocols. Xft/Xft2 is a client-side technology and cannot improve old applications.

   Xft/Xft2, because they are client-side technologies, require updating applications to get anti-aliased fonts. With STSF a server-side setting can enable antialiased fonts for old applications.

Xft was great work. It has put a spotlight on XFree font rendering and provided a solution which works today. Now our goal is to have a world-class font solution which rivals MacOS and Windows. STSF has many important features and we would not be smart to dismiss it due to a political skermish about "letting go of existing work".

DISCLAIMER: I have no connection with either XFree, Xft, Sun, STSF, or any font rendering gihad. The above statements are drawn from my own experience in the PC graphics hardware industry and time spent digging through information on Xft and STSF technologies. If you don't like what I have to say, my post comes with a money back guarantee.

Compare the quality I say

[carlmenezes]

Well currently I must say that even Xft2 is not up to the mark. Sun's proposed solution does seem to be an improvement. I think we should let both these projects flourish and let the community decide. This is tantamount to getting community opinion on quality and implementation.

Competition is good. I don't think it will lead to fragmentation. I think you need to see it more as evolution since that is what it will boil down to.

Re:STSF is technically superior to Xft/Xft2/XRende

[Tailhook]

Cool!

Got any good references to objective information on this?

Re:Why is the Opposition so Strong?

[m1chael]

than they shouldnt have made gtk2 :)
i hate the need for EVERYTHING to be backwards compatible. every once in a while you have to leave the legacy at home. if something is superior and can be assimilated in sure the borg, i mean the XFree86 project can do the same, and any of the opensource projects. that is perfection.

i agree with the anonymous coward.

Why not...

[d2003xx]

just make anti-aliasing and hinting built-in in X-server?

Looks good here too...

[BrokenHalo]

I have a Slackware 9.0 box with Dropline Gnome and Xft-enabled Mozilla. Much better font rendering than I've seen on any XP box.

who cares?

[frozencesium]

*nix fonts are ugly, this has nothing to do with the server subsytem of X. people just need to create some nice fonts for X. (i have found a few to my liking, but i hear people bitching about it).

how about being able to change resolution on the fly...that would be a better addition to X than a new font system.

-frozen

Re:who cares?

[ChrisJones]

Use the fonts Microsoft provides for Windows (Arial, Tahoma, Verdana are all pretty nice). They're available freely from a sourceforge site (can't quite remember the URL offhand).
As for screen resolution changing, you can kinda do this already, but it doesn't resize the viewport. The RandR extension that might be finished for XFree86 5 allows for rotating and resizing the viewport, so you will be able to do a windows-style resolution change (which is what I think you mean).

Nobody is looking at the technical issues!

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the advantages that Stsf seems to have over Xft.

• It is a unified interface for all fonts so you call exactly the same functions for TrueType as type1 and Speedo, unlike Xft which only deals with some font types. The current API is messy and should be replaced with a font-independant one like Stsf.
• It has a server side extension, which can take an entire font vector (string?) and render it in one go which is fast... Xft requires the client to do the rendering and use XRender to alpha-blend it to the background - this is slow and inefficient.
• Stsf provides an Xft compatability layer, Xft apps can run unmodified.

And the advantages of Xft

• It already exists and has a lot of software that uses it.
• It has a nice config file ;)

As a programmer I know which I would rather use...

Answer and it is not re-inventing the wheel

[pamri]

The specs are open, but the implementation is patented. ie., you can create a opentype font and release it under any license even GPL and adobe won't do anything, but the patent is on the method. Again, IANAL, but one of my friends, who is a lawyer is researching this stuff, since we use OTF'S a lot and i will try to put his research online.

I disagree it is reinventing the wheel, but rather it prevents reinventing the wheel, since now OTF'S are being developed for each toolkit, like gtk uses pango, while the qt guys are developing their own. Having such a important feature at the X-server level is good.

Please refer to my previous post on why OTF'S are so important.

but but but, this is madness, surely?

[ChrisJones]

From my reading of the Sun employees vs everyone else threads about this on xfree86's forum mailing list, it seems to me that STSF is about offloading as much of the font layout/hinting as possible to a server, so that thin clients can run in less CPU/RAM. That seems like a sensible goal on the surface.
Except that CPU and RAM are so goddam cheap these days, this simply can't be worth the effort. By the time STSF is finished and the vast amount of work has been completed to integrate it in place of fontconfig and Xft, CPU and RAM will be even cheaper and even faster, so why on earth don't Sun slap 256MB of RAM and a >1ghz CPU in their thin client machines?
Surely that solves the problem without a huge engineering challenge and without returning to the insane paradigm of remote font servers (even though STSF can render locally, thus removing any point it existed for).

I would think that making fontconfig/Xft more efficient at caching and pre-rendering/hinting data would be a better path to improving performance here, or maybe using a gtk theme that has no pixmaps would reduce the memory usage sufficiently. Offloading stuff for the sake of it seems crazy to me.