Re: an idea for building win32 based xfs

[Alexander Gottwald <alexander dot gottwald at s1999 dot tu-chemnitz dot de>]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Kin Taishin wrote:

>   Thanks for dropping me your comments.
> 
> > First of all, don't you mean xfs, not xfd?
> 
>   That's my mistake. It's xfs. Sorry.
> 
> > Secondly, how is this different from running the stock xfs that's in the 
> > XFree86 distro using free-type to support the Windows fonts?
> 
>   I should have stated my point more clearly.
>   I want to get rid of fonts.dir file. mkfontdir doesn't work for me.
>   Although FreeType provides decent font handling functions,
>   win32 API does it better because fonts for Windows are made for 
> Windows use. And I believe cygwin/xfree gains better performance with 
> more exploitation of win32 API.
>   So I have three options:
>   1) remake mkfontdir using win32 API
>      the easiest work but still inside of fonts.dir world.

there is a mkfontdir for truetype fonts. (ttmkfdir)

>   2) remake xfs using win32 API
>      don't know how much work should be done but worth to try?

A lot. the fontserver renders the truetype font to a bitmap font if it
receives a request for font x at size y. You would have to do this for 
all characters.

>   3) replace Xft layer of XFree86 with win32-based code
>      may be...but I'm not an X guru!

never. This would break a lot of remote programs which require X11 fonts.

Better idea: Take xfs, strip all font handling except TTF and replace reading
of fonts.dir by an inline ttmkfdir or build the datastructure using simple
w32api TrueType functions.

bye
	ago