Comment by anthk
2 days 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.
2 days 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.
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.
Well, my fault again. I remember a daemon doing XFT rendering for plain X, from Debian Woody days.
You were half right which is something for stuff this old. I'd entirely forgotten about the font servers, and looking at them, at least xfsft does use FreeType/Xft. It's just that it's still rendering to monochrome bitmaps.
It'd have been a logical extension to figure out the changes to support AA for them as well, so it's a reasonable assumption, especially given the short cutover before Xrender took over and we started getting AA most places. Indeed, Xrender provides all the server-side infra that'd have made it easy-ish to do, by allowing glyph sets with depth...
In retrospect it's also surprising that it wasn't done, because it wouldn't instantly given AA to a lot of applications "stuck" on server side font rendering...