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From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Banish 'font not found' errors forever!
Message-ID: <13305@granite.BBN.COM>
Date: 12 Dec 89 20:53:12 GMT
References: <8912070046.AA14873@kanga.lcs.mit.edu> <6808@b11.ingr.com>
Sender: news@bbn.com
Lines: 46

dwig@b11.ingr.com (David Wiggins) writes:

- 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.

"Can be made arbitrarily smart..."  

Are you talking about different font server implementations being able 
to take some known set of input formats (which may differ from font server 
to font server) and generate X-server compatible font information, in 
which case you can only use input formats that are supported by your 
font server vendor?  

Or is the plan, to the extent there is one at this point, to make all 
font servers agree on at least one basic format (like BDF), so that you 
can adapt to new input formats by writing a format-to-BDF translator?

Is there a wmtalk-like mailing list that's currently discussing font
server issues?

>Also, applications may want to create fonts on the fly.  Can you do this
>using the font server?

This is a good point -- suppose I'm an application writer who has gone 
and licensed font-scaling software and outlines from Sun, Bitstream, or 
J. Random Font Foundry.  My application now has the ability to generate 
its own fonts on the fly in response to what the user asks for -- only 
I can't currently get the server to know about them!  

At least one vendor I know of has dealt with the problem in current
generation X11 by generating all the glyphs on the client side then
building bitmaps for each line of text and shipping them to the server
for display.  It works, but it's slow and kludgey.

Will the proposed font server allow an application to tell the server
about new fonts while it's running?  If so, then it's particularly crucial
that every font server accept some agreed-upon format, so that as a bare
minimum I KNOW my application can take my nonstandard outlines, generate 
bitmaps at some desired size, turn them into BDF files, and hand them to
a font server, which will tell the X server about them.  (Actually, 
allowing applications to define new fonts at runtime seems like it's
going to require a server extension no matter what...)
--
 Matt Landau			Waiting for a flash of enlightenment
 mlandau@bbn.com			  in all this blood and thunder