Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!jim
From: jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Banish 'font not found' errors forever!
Message-ID: <8912070046.AA14873@kanga.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 7 Dec 89 00:46:52 GMT
Sender: root@athena.mit.edu (Wizard A. Root)
Organization: X Consortium, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
Lines: 22


	[description of an X extension to allow downloading of fonts]
	...
	Is the X Consortium working on anything like this?

Sort of.  Instead of having an explicit extension to download fonts, we hope to
develop a font server next year.  When you need application-specific fonts that
your site administrator hasn't installed, you'll just start up a font server
and add it to your FontPath:

	%  ls
	font1.bdf	font2.rle	font3.pk	...
	%  fontserver appfonts &
	%  xset fp+ `hostname`:appfonts
	%  application

In addition to greatly relieving some of the administration burden, the font
server can be made arbitrarily smart about rasterizing various types of fonts,
allowing different input (e.g. scaled) and output (hardware-specific) formats. 


						Jim