[forum] some XFree86 5.0 questions...

[Keith Packard]

Around 14 o'clock on Mar 20, Martijn Sipkema wrote:

> Will XFree86 5.0 use Xft for font rendering or might
> it (also) use Sun's STSF (http://stsf.sf.net)?

You're trying to compare apples with oranges.  Xft is just a new way of
placing specific glyphs at specific locations on the screen while STSF is a
whole text layout system that computes the location for the glyphs based on
complex information available in modern font formats like OpenType's GSUB
and GPOS tables.

STSF is much more comparable with Pango in it's functionality.  These are
"text layout engines", and only a few of them have been deployed anywhere.
Because this area of work is so new, I hope we'll see lots of different
ideas explored so that we can get a sense of what things work best.  It may
be that in a while we'll all have a general agreement on the basic
operations of the system and may be able to standardize on a single
interface, but I think it's imprudent to just pick one now and hope it all
works out.

I will say that I hope STSF can take advantage of what we've learned about 
handling fonts entirely on the client side of the wire.

-keith