On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 13:55:09 -0500 Ambrose Li <acli@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 04:28:05PM +0200, Ciprian Popovici > wrote: > > > * The "old model" of doing things was somewhat similar to > > the modern chain above. Except for a few things: instead > > of fontconfig, X used (and continues using) its own font > > retrieval mechanism in the form of FontPath or the X Font > > Server. (Can't fontconfig replace them? If yes, why hasn't > > it? Is it for backwards compatibility?) Just like the modern > > chain, it uses Xft, freetype and xrender. Xft has suffered > > a few transformations, moving from it's own font retrieval > > mechanism (XftConfig) in 1.0 to using fontconfig in 1.1, and > > to a more advanced use of Xrender in 2.0. > > AFAIK this is wrong. The "old model" does not involve any of > Xft, freetype, and xrender, all of which are quite (very) recent > inventions; rather, because fonts reside on the X server, the > app only need to tell the server what string (as text) to draw > on the screen. An "old" X app can use these new libraries if > the programmer had intended to use those libraries, but their > use would have nothing at all to do with the traditional way > fonts are used in X. I see. I assumed xft, freetype or xrender would be used since they were shipped with XFree, after all. On the other hand, I can see that the usual GTKv1 application, for instance, isn't linked against any of those libraries. -- Ciprian Popovici
