Comment by Findecanor
2 days ago
GTK 1.x used GDK which was a thin veneer on top of Xlib, and I think it defaulted to use Xlib calls for text rendering.
If the X server supported antialiased text (and subpixel rendering) then GTK should have done too.
Do any X servers do? Antialiased text on X is generally done by rendering the glyphs client side.
They did with the XFT font server?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server
Did it? I can't find documentation that suggest it returned antialiased font data. The server could of course request a larger font size and scale it down, but did any do that?
I'm not questioning that it'd be possible to render antialiased fonts server side as there's nothing in X that really prevent it, I just don't recall that being a thing, rather than upgrading apps to use Xrender to render fonts client side and send the servers and atlas of pre-rendered glyphs the way we currently do.
I could very well be wrong - I didn't do much X programming in the brief period it'd have been relevant.
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