[forum] some XFree86 5.0 questions...

[Owen Taylor]

On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 13:24, Martijn Sipkema wrote:
> > > I'll admit we've found some problems with STSF that we've corrected
> > > in our current development (yes, the web site is out of date, we're
> > > working on an update), but we've found the core design works well for
> > > us.  What about it do you find to be bad?
> > 
> > GTK+/Qt/GNOME/KDE/Mozilla are all already using fontconfig/Xft for a
> > year or more, and they work very well for our needs while remaining
> > very simple.  fontconfig/Xft were developed in close cooperation with
> > the toolkits and major open source desktop projects so it's not
> > surprising that they work well for us.
> > 
> > STSF is much more complicated, and the complexity is not solving any
> > problem that we have.
> 
> Perhaps it solves problems others may have. And why not comment on the
> design problems you said STSF has?
> 
> > Aside from the technical issues, STSF is simply too late.
> 
> I doubt that.
> 
> > fontconfig/Xft have already been adopted by both GTK+ and Qt which are
> > the major toolkits, and we aren't interested in having another system.
> 
> There may be others who use X without these toolkits. And there are other
> toolkits. Do you speak for these too, assuming you speak for all GTK+
> and QT developers?

Well, speaking for GTK+ as a project, I think it's highly unlikely
that GTK+ will ever support STSF... not just because Xft and
fontconfig are working well for us, but also because STSF's basic
architecture seems to be unsuitable for using with Pango.
You could probably use STSF as a backend for Pango, but it's always
going to be a really, really, slow backend for Pango. (*)

I can't really take exception to someone working on STSF ... writing
an internationalized text layout engine is a lot of fun, as I know from
having done Pango, and I don't want to deny someone that pleasure.
Though I'm not sure it's a wise use of the resources involved.

(If someone wants a list of a useful stuff that could be done
at the FreeType/fontconfig/Xft layers that would benefit everybody,
I'd be happy to oblige.)

But the primary problem here is not the existence of STSF, but the
fact that STSF is (last I checked) _duplicating_ in an incompatible
way the font configuration and matching architecture of fontconfig.

After many years lacking a good system for installing, locating,
and matching fonts, we are finally getting traction behind 
fontconfig ... Qt, GTK+, Mozilla, gnome-print are just a few of
the projects now using fontconfig. fontconfig may not be a 
perfect solution, but it's quite good, and the free software/
open source community needs to say "this is the solution, 
where it needs improvement, we'll improve it, and we'll use it 
everywhere".

Regards,
                                        Owen


(*) Pango needs it's backend to be able to lay out short strings
    as fast as possible. But every separate string you pass to
    STSF could be a round trip to the STSF server. And if 
    you dropped the client-server nature of STSF, well, then
    I can't really see the point of STSF at all.