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X GUI Sun Microsystems

The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF 337

Posted by Hemos from the the-war-goes-on dept.
NoSun writes "Sun's latest project is to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf, that would replace Fontconfig and Xft2. But the big question is: Does the world need yet another X font library that would create more incompatibility and fragmentation? Well known Gnome and GTK+ developers are against this (yet another) X font library which just re-invents the wheel one more time with the result of slowing down KDE and Gnome in the desktop race. "
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The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF More

The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF

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  • Still inferior (Score:3, Informative)

    by Drunken Coward ( 574991 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @02:53PM (#5617518)
    The font rendering system in Windows is still vastly superior to any free implementation. Fragmentation will only further this problem.

    Competition is a good thing, but in this case collaboration is even better. The more situations we have like this, the longer it will take for Linux to be ready for the desktop.

    • Hello, logic? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:07PM (#5617641)
      - If Sun's project is vastly inferior, no one will use it and it won't cause "fragmentation".

      - If Sun's project is vastly *superior*, then the people who switch to it will enjoy a great implementation. You shouldn't force Sun to collaborate in this case. Mozart's compositions wouldn't be as good if he had been forced to "collaborate" with the inferior composers of his time.

      - It's only if Sun's project is "comparable" to previous projects that it will cause fragmentation.

    • Re:Still inferior (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:08PM (#5617651)
      This isn't quite so true anymore. The font rendering on a modern distro (I'm using Mandrake 9.1 right now) looks comparable to or better than the font rendering on my Windows box. At least, when it's using _good_ True Type fonts, anti-aliasing, hinting, and so forth enabled in FreeType. I've seen some intermittent kerning problems in slightly older versions of FreeType (like in Mandrake 9), but these appear to be largely resolved now. For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.


      That being said, there is still a mess behind the scenes with font rendering. These non-TrueType legacy fonts sitting around should just go away. The frustration that sometimes, mystically, some fonts get anti-aliased and some don't - this isn't something end-users should have to deal with (and to the credit of the Mandrake people, I haven't yet seen any of these problems with the default fontconfig in 9.1). The real problem is the mixing together of all the "legacy" X11 fonts for old school X Windows apps with new TrueType fonts used in modern XRender/Xft apps. This creates a font management nightmare. What's worse is none of the font management programs make all this stuff crystal clear and usable, even for an experienced user.


      So yes, font management is still a big thorn in the side of the X Window System, though it's much better now than it used to be, with Xft/XRender. I don't really see why we would do anything other than A) incrementally improve those and B) make the old rendering system OPTIONAL and try to get everything in modern Linux distros ported over to used the new X rendering infrastructure.


      Rather than writing new font management subsystems for X, perhaps we should look for the longer term to alternatives to X, architectures that are cleaner for a desktop environment, where we can provide source-level compatibility for Qt and Gtk apps, and make the old X protocol a strap-on (like running an X server on a Windows box, or on Mac OS X), so that people who need to run legacy X apps can still do so, but that those who want a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-use desktop environment can get it.


      • firstly you dont qualify sir/mam. you aint in the category of a "joe user". you are ready to play around with font names , font dirs , x config files, truetype fonts etc right ?

        and secondly, i call BULLSHIT. sorry for the harsh words. not directed at you. i just finished a fresh install of psyche and i use debian and other versions of linux on and off
        daily and i think....

        X SUCKS ASS.

        believe me i cant stop laughing whenever i look
        at X and whenever i hear people say things like
        "too much eyecandy in XP and
      • Just out of curiosity what versions of windows are you using? The fonts in WindowsXP are absolutely amazing. Much better than those in Windows2k in my opinion. And much better than any fonts I have ever seen in X.
      • Actually, I am reminded of the state of fonts when I was using Windows 3.1 with regard to having more than one format. When I got my first PC, it had Windows 3.1 on it. Since I planned to be a professional desktop publisher at the time, I new that TrueType fonts were inferior for professional publications. So, I purchased some Adobe fonts and installed the Adoby Type Manager. This worked great for my printing, but made things kind of weird with regard to the rest of the system.

        In XFree86, I think it WO

      • Ok, fixed the fonts (Score:5, Funny)

        by duck_prime ( 585628 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:58PM (#5618079)
        The font rendering on a modern distro (I'm using Mandrake 9.1 right now) looks comparable to or better than the font rendering on my Windows box. [...] For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.
        So we've got the fonts looking nice on Slashdot. Will somebody now please fix the content?

        Sheesh.

      • Re:Still inferior (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mindriot ( 96208 )

        Hmm... yes, the font rendering in X might be good. But what the Linux world really is missing is a centralized, standard font system for all applications. I can certainly enjoy nice on-screen fonts. But try writing a document using the app of your choice, and then printing it. OpenOffice is on the right way (at least it manages to use TrueType fonts to print correct PostScript documents). But currenty it's a real pain to be able to pick any font on the system by its unique name, and then go and use this sam

        • Re:Still inferior (Score:3, Interesting)

          by nathanh ( 1214 )

          Hmm... yes, the font rendering in X might be good. But what the Linux world really is missing is a centralized, standard font system for all applications. I can certainly enjoy nice on-screen fonts. But try writing a document using the app of your choice, and then printing it. OpenOffice is on the right way (at least it manages to use TrueType fonts to print correct PostScript documents).

          It's a mistake to think that there's a centralised standard font system on the other platforms. Windows and MacOS b

    • Re:Still inferior (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:33PM (#5617888)
      This is total bullshit. The guy knows nothing about Xft, Stsf, or FreeType.

      1) FreeType is *very* good. With TrueType hinting enabled, the output on a standard resolution LCD is *dead identical* with the output for the Windows rasterizer. On a high-res LCD, any version of FreeType with the improved autohinters is also extremely good. I personally prefer it to ClearType's rendering, for two reasons: it doesn't require sub-pixel AA (which still causes visible color fringing in Cleartype) to look sharp, and letter shapes look more natural (less hinted, but still sharp). If you don't believe me, look at screenshots of my desktop: this [gatech.edu] and this. [gatech.edu]

      2) Rendering quality has nothing to do with Xft vs Stsf. Neither of these font services do the actual rendering; that is still handled by FreeType. These services are for font finding and font matching.

      • Re:Still inferior (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        FreeType is *very* good. With TrueType hinting enabled, the output on a standard resolution LCD is *dead identical* with the output for the Windows rasterizer.

        Except no Linux distro can legally ship a product with TrueType hinting enabled. Apple has patents on TrueType hinting. [sourceforge.net] So Linux fonts look worse than Windows fonts because of Apple. Ironic?

      • Re:Still inferior (Score:5, Informative)

        by walt-sjc ( 145127 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @09:00PM (#5620201)
        Yeah, and he sure as hell did not read any of the docs at stsf sourceforge. There is a good side-by-side comparison [sourceforge.net] of xft2 and stsf.

        It's quite interesting, and stsf looks like it may have certain advantages over xft2. xft2 for example does not do layout - that's an application thing (gnome uses pango according to the doc) and stsf DOES do layout. According to sun, stsf has a 30-200% performance improvement over xft2.

        stsf does NOT solve all the problems with X fonts however. They are still a god awful mess in regards to configuration.

    • Must realize... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bazmonkey ( 555276 )
      1) In the good-old OSS world, telling people not to fragment is often their most compelling reason to do so :)

      2) Windows font rending probably isn't better "technically". Windows font rendering is superior because it's the only rendering system they have, so applications can't prance along using something else. They have stuck by their rendering system and improved it over the years, too, not because it was technologically prefect, but because Microsoft can fire anyone that wants to do something else.
    • The font rendering system in Windows is still vastly superior to any free implementation. Fragmentation will only further this problem.

      The font rendering system on Windows is pretty much irrelevant to anything: it makes no difference at printing resolutions, and at screen resolutions the Linux bitmaps and FT renderers are perfectly adequate for on-screen use. Furthermore, any differences will be meaningless once screen resolutions go up a little further.

      Besides, this idea of an exact WYSIWYG representa

  • Why not True Type Fonts. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mpost4 ( 115369 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @02:54PM (#5617521) Homepage Journal
    I know I will get slammed for this, but why does X not just go for True Type fonts. There are many of these out there. Also what is up the the Fonts now coming to X over a socket, I usaly just disable that and point my X configuration to the directory that has the Fonts in it. But there is a Font standard out there, why don't we use it. Is it that hard to use True Type fonts???

    There are many True Type fonts out there just look here

    http://www.1001freefonts.com/xfonts.htm

    This is the best I could find for True Type fonts on linux

    http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue28/ayers1.html

    X 4 does support True Type Fonts but it makes it harder to use, It should be an automatic thing. How hard would it be to to add the the "startx" script

    ---

    STARTEDFROM = `pwd`
    cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/
    # this assumes that the True Type fonts are in that directory
    ttmkfdir > fonts.scale
    mkfontdir
    cd $STARTEDFROM
    ---------

    Face it we will not get Joe end use on linux if we keep things hard to use, if you want Joe end use to use linux, we must make it as easy to use and setup as windows is. Don't get me wrong I love linux and would not use anything else, but I don't have problems with it because I do know know to deal with it and am not afraid of my computer. Joe end user, does not know how to deal with computers and to an extent is afraid of computers. I think it is that fear that prevents more people from just toying with their computers, the are afraid that if they break something the computer will never work again, it is this fear we have to eliminate before we get people to be comfortable with their computers.

    Sorry about the long post, I stop rambling now.

    This is just my 2c (if you must give me change back, give it back)

    • Re:Why not True Type Fonts. (Score:5, Informative)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @02:55PM (#5617536) Journal
      IIRC, TrueType fonts are patent encumbered.

      If they werent, the OS community would have cloned them by now.
      • IIRC, TrueType fonts are patent encumbered.

        Sort of...see link. Apple owns some patents on truetype. Here [sourceforge.net]

        If they werent, the OS community would have cloned them by now.

        They have. Freetype. From whence I got the link.

        Brief synopsis: Creating true-type fonts and distributing them is not infringing on a patent. Using them isn't either, mostly - there are a few rendering techniques that make truetype fonts look great on systems that license the tech. To use these in an OS/program that doesn't licens

    • Re:Why not True Type Fonts. (Score:4, Informative)

      by hanwen ( 8589 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:05PM (#5617623) Homepage Journal
      you're whining. On RedHat 8, I just plonk the .ttf in ~/.fonts/ and it shows up in all font dialogs. This is exactly the point of the fontconfig library being discussed.
    • While you've got some valid points about usability, I have to say your script is "interesting". I definitely don't think it's a good idea for a multiuser box, given that users will need write permissions on the font directory for it to work. (Or the script would have to be suid, even less appealing.)
      • > I definitely don't think it's a good idea for a multiuser box

        True for a multiuser box, but for Joe end user, it does not matter, he does not think about security, That is why in XP you can disable the login screen and have a automatic log in. See here [winguides.com] Joe end use just sees security like this as something that keeps him (or her) away from his work or games.

    • Harder to use? More automatic than what? (Score:4, Informative)

      by oGMo ( 379 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:25PM (#5617806)
      I know I will get slammed for this, but why does X not just go for True Type fonts. There are many of these out there. Also what is up the the Fonts now coming to X over a socket, I usaly just disable that and point my X configuration to the directory that has the Fonts in it. But there is a Font standard out there, why don't we use it. Is it that hard to use True Type fonts???
      X 4 does support True Type Fonts but it makes it harder to use, It should be an automatic thing.

      Sorry, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. XFree86 supports TrueType just like it supports Type1 fonts. You just make sure the proper module is in your XF86Config (which it is in most cases these days), and you're set. Type1 fonts aren't "built in" either, and they shouldn't be.

      Face it we will not get Joe end use on linux if we keep things hard to use, if you want Joe end use to use linux, we must make it as easy to use and setup as windows is.
      I think it is that fear that prevents more people from just toying with their computers, the are afraid that if they break something the computer will never work again, it is this fear we have to eliminate before we get people to be comfortable with their computers.

      You just contradicted yourself. Either we need to make it easier so Joe User can continue fearing his computer, or we eliminate the fear so Joe has no problem with configuring his computer.

      You are more correct in your latter assessment though. The "Microsoft attitude" (also the "Apple attitude" I suppose) is that users are dumb, and dumb is A-OK, and computers are these magical boxes they deign to make accessible for the lowly end user to use. It's pretty easy to show that nothing is really difficult, it's all a result of this attitude. Stick a complete newbie, who has never used a computer before, or not enough to get used to one, in front of a Linux box, with some instructions. Watch them do great. Now stick a fairly experience Windows user in front of a Linux box, with even better instructions. Watch them flounder miserably. I've repeated this experiment many times, and it's quite sad.

      Anyway, back on topic. X fonts. There's no reason you can't add your own to your own user directory with something like the above. And of course there's no reason to restart X, either. Just xset fp+ /my/font/dir, run the proper mkfontdir commands on it, and xset fp rehash. Stick something like this in your .xinitrc and you should be set with something like $HOME/.myfonts you can add stuff to. It'd even be trivial to script up a GUI.

      • Re:Harder to use? More automatic than what? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mpost4 ( 115369 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:36PM (#5617903) Homepage Journal
        I do not believe that making Joe end user less afraid of the computer, and making computer easyer to use are mutaly exclusive goals. I think both should be the goals of all people in the computer industry. From Coders to Help Desk reps.

        • I concur (Score:2)

          by oGMo ( 379 )

          I do not believe that making Joe end user less afraid of the computer, and making computer easyer to use are mutaly exclusive goals. I think both should be the goals of all people in the computer industry. From Coders to Help Desk reps.

          I most wholeheartedly concur.

          However, let's not forget that "easier to learn" and "easier to use" are two completely different things. Something that is easier to use, such as a good editor, may be harder to learn. But, you only learn once; you'll be using it for a m

    • Re:Why not True Type Fonts. (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:26PM (#5617813)
      Okay, let's get this straight. Things that stsf and xft are not:

      1) A font renderer. The underyling font renderer for both is FreeType2. Each one will have pretty much the same output.
      2) A font standard. This is not a replacement or competitor to TrueType or Postscript fonts.

      stsf and xft are font services libraries. They're libraries that applications use to find fonts, get information about fonts, match non-available fonts to available ones, and request that text be rendered (though the rendering, again, is done by a seperate back-end renderer).

      X can already use TrueType fonts, btw. What we're talking about is the service that's use to find and render those fonts.
    • Also what is up the the Fonts now coming to X over a socket, I usaly just disable that and point my X configuration to the directory that has the Fonts in it.

      that's nice for home computers and very simple uses. But those of us that have managed Terminal servers use that font server.

      remember Linux and X is not some rinky-dink consumer OS like the Microsoft products, it's a enterprise scale product designed for networks and distributed use, you just happen to be using 1/10th of it's capabilities and don't
    • We are using true type fonts. Xft2 and suns new thing are libraries for automatically loading true type fonts, exactly as you suggest. Thing is, applications need to know how to use this library. The controversy is over which one to use, because applications interact with them differently.
    • why does X not just go for True Type fonts.

      It has. XFree86 supports TT fonts in its xfs server, in the display server itself, and the current generation of client libraries (fontconfig / Xft2) support client side handling of TT fonts as well.

      Also what is up the the Fonts now coming to X over a socket, I usaly just disable that and point my X configuration to the directory that has the Fonts in it

      There's no difference, as far as the X server is concerned. You won't see a performance difference, but c

  • makes we want to go back to lynx+pine+tin (Score:4, Funny)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @02:58PM (#5617560) Homepage
    these are the kind of things that make me want to switch back to text based console and lynx+pine+tin. seriously...
    • I'm sorry the parent was modded down, I think it's a valid criticism. Back several years ago I ran X for a while (as in back when fast graphics was a good PCI card on a P166), but got totally fed up with the byzantine layers of software required to do anything.

      I know the OSS movement hates monolithic arcitectures, but I can't help but think the GUI environment under UNIX would be much better off with a monolithic GUI component that handled fonts, the window manager, GUI library and so on. One thing to bu

  • Sun (Score:3, Informative)

    by dfn5 ( 524972 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:01PM (#5617588) Journal
    If Sun develops a new font mechanism for XFree86 than they will probably also make it available in the main stream X11R6 which is good for portability. Fontconfig isn't available on Sun at the moment so I say go Sun.
  • I've been running with Xft for some time now and I would'nt want anything else.

    Why ? Simple: if it's not broken, don't fix it. The thing is, it works, why try to mess things up ? Try improving on them or make them better, but don't create another monster.

    And Sun... Please... Anyone but them, they're already having problems keeping their OS together, common... ;-)

    RV
    • You wouldn't want a font system that is up to 200% faster [sourceforge.net] than what you have now?
      • Well, considering it would save something like 1/10 of a second by page shown... NO.

        Except maybe if I'm running X on a Sparc... Then, I would surely be more than happy to save 200% of my time working instead of waiting for this slower-than-slow processor. Let's face it, SPARC is far from being a great revolution here, that's probably why they're trying so hard to develop new softwares to increase performances, or at least, give the illusion that it performs better.

        But again, I'm running Linux on my P4
        • Well, considering it would save something like 1/10 of a second by page shown... NO.

          Viewing "pages" is not where the differences are seem. Think about all the output generated from something like s full kernel compile, and then think about it again.

          Once you've done that, try it! You would be amazed at how much difference there is between compiling a kernel with the output going to:
          a) xterm (using standard x core fonts)
          b) gnome-terminal (using xft fonts)

          or even:
          c) console.

          c is significantly faster than
      • Except that paper is rather biased, just go read the XFree forum to see peoples opinions on it.

        I got the impression the main reason Sun wanted this is for the SunRay boxes.

  • More is better (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:01PM (#5617592) Homepage Journal
    Just having one "standard" is what most Linux/Open Source programmers were complaining about more than 10 years ago.

    Enforcing a standard library on everyone just invites bloat. If Sun wants to develop their own font library, my reply is "So what?". If people like their library, they will use it. If they find that the library is bloated or duplicated effort, people will avoid it like the plague.

    Why folks at Gnome or KDE would care how Sun chooses to spend their resources is beyond my comprehension. No one is holding a gun to their heads and forcing them to use STSF. Let them continue to use the current font library.

    And why is anyone taking Sun seriously in the realm of Linux/GNU/XFree anyhow? Wasn't Sun supposed to release their own version of Linux by now?
    • Why dont more people think like this?

      I mean its open source. If Sun wants to waste effort reinventing the wheel, then it's their effort to waste.

      People around here seem so convinced that open source coders are somehow have obligations. They dont.

      It's like "Why is that guy giving away free pizza? I had pizza for lunch, he should be giving away tacos!"
    • And why is anyone taking Sun seriously in the realm of Linux/GNU/XFree anyhow? Wasn't Sun supposed to release their own version of Linux by now?
      Heh. What about the developers they pay to work on GNOME?

    • Re:More is better (Score:3, Insightful)

      by stevef ( 5539 )
      > And why is anyone taking Sun seriously in the
      > realm of Linux/GNU/XFree anyhow? Wasn't Sun
      > supposed to release their own version of Linux by
      > now?

      Well, Sun is one of the larger contributors to the
      GNOME project. Not that that alone gives them any
      more say on the issue than others, but perhaps it
      does show their interest in and committment to other
      free/open projects such as GNOME and XFree.
      • Well, Sun is one of the larger contributors to the GNOME project. Not that that alone gives them any more say on the issue than others, but perhaps it does show their interest in and commitment to other free/open projects such as GNOME and XFree.

        Mister Proper made a similar comment, so let me address you both in one reply.

        If a company's Linux/Open Source contribution is in the form of support that has strings attached, then I figure you need to watch your back.

        I think that Sun supports Gnome because it
  • Considering Sun is moving their Solaris desktop to Gnome, I am surprised that they are going against the wishes of the Gnome developers. What do they have to gain from this?

  • Compatibility vs. evolution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:04PM (#5617613) Homepage Journal
    If that new library is better in architecture, extensibility, internationalization and future grow than the existing one, maybe is a not so bad idea to go in that direction.

    Sometimes for an improvement you should throw all previous code and start from zero, ask BIND and sendmail people about this.

  • restarting X (Score:2, Interesting)

    by carpe_noctem ( 457178 )
    Personally, I think the biggest problem other than ugly looking fonts in X is the fact that installing fonts requires one to restart X. Could someone explain to me why this necessary and why other X fonts servers haven't fixed this yet?
    • Huh, wha? What ever happened to your little buddy xset fp rehash?

      I don't think you have to restart with Xft either, although I havn't had an opportunity to install a font under it yet.

    • Re:restarting X (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:11PM (#5617681)
      Ignorance strikes again. It is not necessary, just add a font to the fontconfig directory (~/.fonts, for a user), and the font will be available via fontconfig/xft2. For core fonts you need xset fp rehash. In no case do you need to restart the XFree86 server.
      • I forget, is this thread about how much better Linux is than windows? In windows you just drag and drop the font into the Fonts folder of the control panel. If it is confusing amoung Linux users, it is just more proof that Linux will never be mainstream, despite its being superior at certain tasks.
        • In GNOME you just drag and drop the font into the fonts folder in Nautilus. Big deal.
        • I'd guess the cause of this difference might be lying deep inside some kernel/vfs(?) functions windows has, and linux (2.4.19 IIRC) has not.

          In windows, there's this function which can be used to register for a directory change (don't know how it's called), and not-brand-new kernel versions don't have that.
          So, when some core libraries come around using this function, there should be a non hackish way to automatically register fonts when they are dropped into a directory.

          That's just me guessing.
        • KDE and GNOME both have capable utilities for installing and previewing fonts graphically.
  • One of the things that's always struck me about X is that the type rendering is poor, compared to the state-of-the-art rendering on contemporary commercial OSes. This has been true, in my personal comparisons, over many years. (I.e., as X advances, so does the state-of-the-art, making relative progress nil.)

    I remember when I worked at Be, we licensed a renderer from Bitstream, specifically because writing a really good type renderer is exceptionally hard.

    Perhaps this is an area where Open Source nees a leg up from a well-funded commercial outfit, like Sun. Can anyone comment on the actual quality of this new library, relative to existing solutions?
    • A leg up isn't sufficient. Problem is, a lot of technologies in the font rendering area are patented. For instance, there is no _really_ good hinting engine enabled for truetype fonts, simply because it's patent ecumbered and would require licence fees for every desktop using it. That is not to say a hinting engine isn't available, just that it's not compiled in...

    • Re:Mightn't this be a good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:37PM (#5617917)
      From all indications, it appears that stsf uses FreeType as a backend renderer. FreeType, in recent versions (2.1.3, 2.1.4) is extremely good. Have you taken a look at it lately?
  • in order to run fast enough, but Sun and other non-XFree86 X11 implementations don't support this extension?

    Why don't/won't they support the XRender extension?

    Are the features available from STSF (which is under the BSD license) sufficiently better than what is available to warrant the work necessary for making the changeover?

    • Re:XFT2 needs the XRender XFree86 extension ... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, Solaris 2.9 does come with the XRENDER extension.

      Unfortunately it does not work.

      The real underlying problem (for Sun) is that the XRENDER extension requires 32-bit frame buffers. Sun's (at least most of their) frame buffers support 8 bits and 24 bits and maybe 1 bit. Sun's bogus XRENDER probably exists in order to please {Star,Open}Office which may only need the 8-bit part.

      Sun could probably upgrade the frame buffer drivers, but it is not clear that deployed cards have that extra 33% memory ly

  • Change for the sake of change in a stupid thing, if it improved the X Windows System I'm all for it.

    On the other hand this infighting is hurting all the *NIXs. If the development of the GUI system is stopped because of this stupuid crap we will never see commercail quality entertinament titles relased on the *NIXs. and it wouldn't matter how nice KDE/Gnome look if you can't bring in the gamers tio the desktop market Linux people are looking to take from Microsoft.

  • Name change? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:12PM (#5617698) Homepage Journal
    to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf,

    Maybe they should rename it to stfu...

    Baa--dum! Thank you.. I'll be here all weekend.

  • If Sun's SFST can be better, I'm all for it. Fontconfig/Xft/Xrender has a slight problem of being extremely academic. They authors are quite interested in tackling polygon intersection corner cases, but are apparently not interested in practical problems like gamma correction. The latter results in the terrible white-on-black rendering found in the present XFree86.

    Possibly competition will help both project move along faster.

  • Since it currently sucks... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Art Popp ( 29075 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:14PM (#5617706)
    ...I would welcome some kind of change.

    As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.

    Havoc makes a good point:
    You also still have to show the server-side stuff working with good performance and real-life significant memory savings.

    But one can't put something to that test unless one develops it.

    It basically comes down to: If a corporation is going to invest money in an open source development they are going to have some influence on how it's spent (in this case in terms of man hours). This influence may not be considered optimal to the other people in the movement, but it is Sun's money to spend.

    And since I'm running RH 8.0, and OpenOffice, GIMP and AbiWord all have completely different font selections, I can't really see how it's going to get more fragmented.

    Thank you for your efforts Sun Microsystems, I'm anxious to see the reuslts.

    • As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.

      20 minutes with hindsight? Ok - here is the state of the art.

      1. Open your .fonts directory in your home direct
    • Actually, Gimp and AbiWord use FontConfig/Xft2 either directly or indirectly (read: transparently) now, as can any GTK2 application. I suggest you go get gimp 1.3.12 and AbiWord 1.1.4. Ximian's OpenOffice will use Xft2/Fontconfig as well. Expect that to be released _soon_

      Having worked on these projects, I know all too well how bad it was. The font situation *was* deeply fragmented. Fontconfig made it all better. Let's not make it suck again. IMO, Sun would do better to simply support the Render extension o
  • A little off topic but still of interest, the XFree86 project is now using Bugzilla [mozillazine.org] which sounds like a step in the right direction.

  • Question... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Trashman ( 3003 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:32PM (#5617883)

    How open is Opentype [adobe.com]?

    • The specs are open, but the implementation is patented. ie., you can create a opentype font and release it under any license even GPL and adobe won't do anything, but the patent is on the method. Again, IANAL, but one of my friends, who is a lawyer is researching this stuff, since we use OTF'S a lot and i will try to put his research online.

      I disagree it is reinventing the wheel, but rather it prevents reinventing the wheel, since now OTF'S are being developed for each toolkit, like gtk uses pango, while

  • Stsf: because Xft2 doesn't use enough buzzwords (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:33PM (#5617889) Homepage Journal
    From Sun's side-by-side comparison, it seems like Xft2 is a carefully designed project taking into account the needs of application designers to reach a clearly defined goal, whereas Stsf is has vaguely-defined and excuses its unjustified design with a lot of buzzwords.

    Xft2 is slightly inferior in that it doesn't have a way of communicating the data to the server pre-rasterization, so that the server can use hardware acceleration in the rendering process. Of course, there's no particular reason that, once XRENDER is complete, this couldn't be done.

  • Sun fonts vs. OSS fonts (Score:3, Informative)

    by lindsayt ( 210755 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @03:39PM (#5617933)
    I don't know much about this whole thing. All I know is that I use a Sun for my desktop instead of my RedHat 7.3 box precisely because Sun's fonts are so much better than the ones in RedHat 7.3. Fonts in Solaris are substantially comparable to those in Windows, whereas those in Red Hat still lag behind.

    Whether this has any bearing on the specific issue of XFT2 vs. STSF, I don't know. Perhaps the proposed STSF doesn't even resemble the font set in Solaris, and perhaps my RedHat font issues have nothing to do with XFT2. But regardless, I use Solaris on my desktop for font reasons, and I'm more likely to trust Sun's fonts than OSS ones simply because of my prior experience.

    Of course sometimes prior experience can cause people to be stubborn, ignorant and misinformed. I'll hope that's not the case here...
    • I think most people aren't sure what STSF does.... it doesn't render fonts, it isn't a collection of fonts, so it'll make little difference to how the desktop looks. It is more comparable to Pango, as it performs internationlized text rendering and reflow/layout.
  • Sure, if Sun contributes a high-quality font rendering library and takes on the burden of dealing with TrueType patents, that could be a good thing.

    The trouble is, Sun has produced one bloated failure after another when it comes to graphics and window systems: from OpenWindows to NeWS to Java2D. They promise a lot, but they don't deliver. Just based on their history, I really don't want them anywhere near X11.

  • Seriously, is there any good documentation on this? Is there some intro to the different type of fonts? How to set them up? Xft/Freetype stuff?

    I just want some decent looking fonts like the MS Core fonts and some other new TrueTypes like the Bitstream Veras.

    The only resource that I've found that helped was the font De-uglification how-to. Say for Debian woody. The fonts look like crap out of the box, how do you make everything look nice? I see these gorgeous anti-aliased font screenshots but have no idea

  • Why do we need another god damned font packages? How many times do we have to reinvent the wheel?

    Really, modern monitors are making things like anti-aliasing obsolete and inferior. I have a 1600x1200 screen. Even with fonts sizes at 120 and no anti-aliasing, they look fine. if anything, anti-aliasing makes fonts look worse -- what it really is is font-bluring. And GNU/Linux does have scaleable (vector) fonts, which means that they don't become blocky messes as you scale them up.

    So, why do we need this
    • "How many times do we have to reinvent the wheel?"

      My grandfather designed the first machine that made steel belted tires. So in a sense, he reinvented the wheel, and that was a good thing.

      Just because someone is redoing something that exists, doesn't mean it is a bad thing.

  • One already exists of course..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @04:43PM (#5618485)
    One issue I think a lot of posters here are missing is that fontconfig and the rest are already deployed and working, whereas STSF isn't even completely implemented yet.

    That means STSF doesn't have to be just a little bit better, it has to be VASTLY better to justify ripping out a brand new font architecture. Nobody is convinced it is.

    Other people seem to be of the belief that having 2 competing font systems is ok. It's not - this is two competing interfaces, NOT implementations. Well, STSF can apparently emulate Xft, but you don't get any advantages that way, so what's the point?

    So STSF had better be pretty amazing to justify it. Sure, Sun can go and use it if they like, but it'd require major b0rkage of GTK, and those patches would probably not make it back into the trunk, so they'd have basically forked GTK. Not good.

  • Why and old distro is a happy day. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SomeOtherGuy ( 179082 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:58PM (#5619488) Journal
    Try crawling through the internals of any recent "desktop" distro to find all the different font solutions working "together" to render your desktop apps and X window system, and you will soon find that no two applications seem to use the same solution. Even better yet try turning them all of for a sanity check. Anti alias this, font config that, it's a mess. Maybe no one will agree with me -- but I spent a month wondering why one application looked fine, and another looked pukey, and another looked like it would never render anything above 7 pixels. 500+ fonts installed -- and no single application could use more than a handful of them. And no two applications across graphics libraries (gtk1, gtk2, gtk2 antialias, qt, qt anti alias, etc.) seemed to use the same handful. I finally decided to go back to the days where applications just used the default font server provided by launching Xwindow. I downloaded the "ancient" xfstt and imported my favorite TT Fonts -- and I was up and running with Debian stable. The only problem I have now is trying to get slightly newer verisons of some of my apps.....Some of this stuff in Debian stable are stuck in the point release my Grandfather used in his day.

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