[forum] some XFree86 5.0 questions...

[Martijn Sipkema]

[...]
> 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. (*)

[...]
> (*) 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.

To be honest, this really is not my area of expertise, but I felt
a font server was the better approach. It seems this may have
performance issues. Are there any papers you know of on this issue?

--ms