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From: eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Fonts vs Bitmaps
Message-ID: <8704150211.AA06329@BINKLEY.MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 14-Apr-87 21:11:54 EST
Article-I.D.: BINKLEY.8704150211.AA06329
Posted: Tue Apr 14 21:11:54 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Apr-87 01:27:32 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
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I am working on Foundation, a large X based WYSIRN (What You See Is
Really Neat) editor for the Athena Writing project. Athena just got
the Adobe fonts, as textfiles with lots of information in them. I
wrote font reader routines and a front end to X which replaced all of
the XText calls with my own routines to handle the bitmap fonts, and
send the bitmaps over to the server.
Relative performance: If you send the bitmaps every time, it is about
10-30 times slower than X fonts (this is on Xqvss on a MicroVax II,
about 2Meg of ram.) If you cache them on the server, you can get
better than this, but you can generally paint a full height, half
width window in 6 seconds with caching, 30 seconds without, versus under
1/2 sec with normal Xfonts. In our installation, the X fonts are
hardwired into a remote shared disk, so they can't be updated for easy
experimentation... this is too bad, actually, since the existing fonts
are poor, and in cases patently wrong...
	
		/Happy Hacking...........\
		\.............Mark Eichin/