Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!eileen!gjc
From: gjc@mga.COM (George J. Carrette)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Banish 'font not found' errors forever!
Message-ID: <116@eileen.mga.com>
Date: 15 Dec 89 21:18:19 GMT
References: <8912070046.AA14873@kanga.lcs.mit.edu> <6808@b11.ingr.com> <114@eileen.mga.com> <6846@b11.ingr.com>
Organization: MGA, Inc.
Lines: 27
In-reply-to: dwig@b11.ingr.com's message of 14 Dec 89 23:42:28 GMT

In article <6846@b11.ingr.com> dwig@b11.ingr.com (David Wiggins) writes:
   [gjc comments about not using fonts]

   Are you really satisfied with this?  Isn't it tantalizing to think that your
   text drawing could be occuring several times faster if you could only feed
   your font to the server?  To us, it was irresistable; thus the sendfont
   extension.

Yes and no. Yes in that for mathematical applications my font characters
are large enough and self-contained enough that each "Symbol" (which may
actually be a sequence of characters, e.g. "Xi" "Z.3") has a lot
of information in it, from the users point of view, so the all important
"information-paint-rate" (IPR), appears to be acceptable.

No in that I see no reason, (from having looked at the instruction sets
of some of the latest graphics chips) that general BITBLIT type operations
from pixel arrays to windows should not be approximately competitive
with so-called "character set" special case handling. Of course you get
a different idea if you are talking about the implementation, in C,
of the R3 X11 server.

For painting english text one might think about a cache mechanism for
the most common words being painted to the screen. Why limit yourself to
"fonts." Certainly *people* don't READ a character at a time, they read
a word at a time, or words at a time, so why not *display* a word at a time?

-gjc