[forum] some XFree86 5.0 questions...

[Havoc Pennington]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 09:23:07AM -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 02:41:53PM +0100, Martijn Sipkema wrote:
> > 
> >>Will XFree86 5.0 use Xft for font rendering or might
> >>it (also) use Sun's STSF (http://stsf.sf.net)?
> > 
> > Xft is the standard. STSF is a bad design, and none of the toolkits
> > that matter are interested in supporting it.
> 
> I'll admit we've found some problems with STSF that we've corrected
> in our current development (yes, the web site is out of date, we're
> working on an update), but we've found the core design works well for
> us.  What about it do you find to be bad?

GTK+/Qt/GNOME/KDE/Mozilla are all already using fontconfig/Xft for a
year or more, and they work very well for our needs while remaining
very simple.  fontconfig/Xft were developed in close cooperation with
the toolkits and major open source desktop projects so it's not
surprising that they work well for us.

STSF is much more complicated, and the complexity is not solving any
problem that we have.

Aside from the technical issues, STSF is simply too late.
fontconfig/Xft have already been adopted by both GTK+ and Qt which are
the major toolkits, and we aren't interested in having another system.
At this point, new functionality needs to take the form of enhancing
Xft, not replacing it.

Havoc