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Comment by vidarh

1 day ago

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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vidarh

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anthk  1 day ago

Back in the day there was a font server for antialiased fonts, xfstt:

https://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue28/ayers1.html

That was what I was looking for.

  • vidarh  1 day ago

    Thanks for the pointer, but from the page you linked to:

    > Even though xfstt doesn't do any anti-aliasing of the fonts (since there's no support for this in X)

    The page it links to for xfsft as well, says this:

    > Although FreeType does support font smoothing, the modified libfont.a does not. Adding font smoothing to X would require a major change to the system: in X, glyphs are (monochrome) bitmaps, and there is no support for using pixmaps as glyphs. Changing this would require the design and implementation of an extension to both the X protocol and the font server protocol, and changing applications to use the extensions.

    It goes on to link to the Xrender extension as a solution.