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List:       xfree-fonts
Subject:    Re: [Fonts]a font server backwards ?
From:       Keith Packard <keithp () keithp ! com>
Date:       2001-12-29 4:06:00
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Around 20 o'clock on Dec 28, Sergey Babkin wrote:

> This is not very convenient because it makes running the running of a font
> server by a random user not very easy. Also if it happens that the font
> server crashes or has not been started, the X server tends to freese.

Many applications come with custom application-specific font servers that 
are simple applications run by regular users; no special privledges are 
required to be a font server.  The X server no longer hanges when the font 
server is broken; that was simply a long standing bug fixed when I wrote 
an application specific font server running on an extremely unreliable OS.

> As far as I understand, the Render extension allows an application
> to provide bitmaps to be used as fonts. Hovewer these fonts are
> used only by one application and can't be shared with the others.

As with any resource, the glyphsets used by Render applications for text 
output can be shared among applications.  Render actually permits 
applications to generate their own XIDs to ensure they don't disappear 
with the departure of another client. 

Further, Render shares identical glyphs when delivered by multiple clients
-- this turns out to be all that is really needed to make client side fonts
more efficient than server side fonts as the glyph image data transmitted
from client to server is nearly always smaller than the glyph metric data
that would otherwise be transmitted from server to client.

Client-side fonts are just a better idea than any amount of server-side 
craziness.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab


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