5 ms·

If you are on Linux, you will probably want to convert to OTB instead. Pango has dropped support for BDF and it’s just a matter of time before your distro gets

If you are on Linux, you will probably want to convert to OTB instead. Pango has dropped support for BDF and it’s just a matter of time before your distro gets hit with the full effect (if you are on a “stable” channel then you probably haven’t gotten hit yet). If you use old-school X programs without Pango you may not notice, but nearly everything on Linux that doesn’t look like XTerm uses Pango. See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion As a side effect, the fonts will probably work better as OTB anyway. At least, that’s my experience.

bitwize 6y ago
Makes sense. Bdf is an X11 format, and X is deprecated technology. X font rendering is certainly deprecated.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > X is deprecated technology That is false, X and Xorg are being under continuous development. Some Wayland fanboys use this as weaselwords to convince less informed people to migrate to it in an attempt to increase its user share, but Xorg still has dedicated developers working on it and it wont go anywhere for the foreseeable future.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    > Some Wayland fanboys use this as weaselwords to convince less informed people… This is some first-class flamebait in really poor taste. Anyway—from what I understand, Xorg is is nearing the end of its life as an actively developed project. You can see that the release cadence is much slower than it was a couple years ago, it’s gone from something like a six-month cadence to a two-year cadence. The lion’s share of the development is sponsored by orgs like Red Had and they’ve publicly warned people that this may not continue into the future. See: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Ma... The comments about font rendering technology are relevant. You simply can’t use X font rendering to achieve what is, in 2020, considered to be the bare minimum for text presentation. Up until recently, this was papered over by libraries that could abstract over the differences between old-style X fonts and modern TTF fonts (TTF is almost as old as X!) For various reasons, the backwards compatibility was ditched a few months ago. The abstraction had just grown too unwieldy and had too many special cases.
    - dilandau 6y ago
      >not constantly changing equals it's end-of-life No, it just means that its stable. I understand that it's probably habit to justify constant changes to your software projects, but in my experience, it's a good thing to be conservative, and a very good thing to maintain compatibility over a very long span of time. EDIT: I swear, what is it with people opportunistically virtue-signalling on HN comments? Masks? Really?
      - bitwize 6y ago
        Ackshually, what happened was the X11 maintainers jumped ship to Wayland. Once again, just about everyone who knows thing one about graphics on Linux is on board with the Wayland transition. Just like everyone who knows thing one about virology or epidemiology is on board with social distancing and wearing a mask.
        badsectoracula 6y ago
        > X11 maintainers jumped ship to Wayland. Some maintainers, last time i checked others like Keith Packard are working exclusively on Xorg. > Once again, just about everyone who knows thing one about graphics on Linux is on board with the Wayland transition. I know "thing one" about graphics on Linux and i'm certainly not on board with Wayland transition. > Just like everyone who knows thing one about virology or epidemiology is on board with social distancing and wearing a mask. That is not a good comparison.
      - klodolph 6y ago
        Compatibility comes at a cost—by supporting old users, sometimes you fail to support new users. This is not hypothetical, this is at the core of the problem with BDF fonts.
        badsectoracula 6y ago
        How does supporting BDF fonts makes a project fail to support new users? It sounds like a problem with the library's architecture, not an unsolvable technical hurdle.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't do flamebait or name-calling here. It degrades discussion and evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      So what should i call what bitwize does in a comment below where he essentially writes that not being into Wayland is like not being into social distancing and wearing a mask?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dilandau 6y ago
  Wayland fans: so desperate for traction that they'll snap up any chance to spread false information. Or maybe this commenter doesn't know the difference between gnome/pango and xorg/xft? Xorg isn't going anywhere for a very long time.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Of course I know the difference. Pango is part of the "new world" in which all text rendering is done client-side. BDF is the old X11 bitmap format, used for X11's server-side text rendering. It makes sense for Pango to move away from supporting it, as hardly anyone uses BDF anymore except for backward compatibility with legacy X applications, and the world is moving away from X. Matter of fact, rendering everything is moving to client side, hence why X is increasingly unnecessary, and why Wayland is designed the way it is. Oh, and among "Wayland fans" you can count just about everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics stack, except maybe for Keith Packard. So yes, getting traction is important, because no one wants to keep maintaining the broken X architecture. Xorg is largely maintained by Red Hat who have put it in "hard maintenance" mode with virtually no new development.
    - dilandau 6y ago
      Ah yes, the "new world" that the developers like and that ultimately complicates things for end-users, and obsoletes 30+ years of software in the process. I prefer stability.
      - bitwize 6y ago
        You want to talk complicating things for end users? Does "XF86Config" mean anything to you? X only got halfway decent when the KMS driver came out, migrating much of the video hardware functionality OUT of X and into the kernel. The X server is thus now largely a state tracker for an obsolete protocol. Meanwhile, Wayland has pretty much the same graphics server architecture that Windows and macOS had decades ago. It finally brings the Linux desktop architecture in line with the state of the art. There may be a rough transition period, but the faster the Linux community pulls together and rips the X band-aid off, the shorter that period will be.

bitwize 6y ago

Makes sense. Bdf is an X11 format, and X is deprecated technology. X font rendering is certainly deprecated.

badsectoracula 6y ago
> X is deprecated technology That is false, X and Xorg are being under continuous development. Some Wayland fanboys use this as weaselwords to convince less informed people to migrate to it in an attempt to increase its user share, but Xorg still has dedicated developers working on it and it wont go anywhere for the foreseeable future.
- klodolph 6y ago
  > Some Wayland fanboys use this as weaselwords to convince less informed people… This is some first-class flamebait in really poor taste. Anyway—from what I understand, Xorg is is nearing the end of its life as an actively developed project. You can see that the release cadence is much slower than it was a couple years ago, it’s gone from something like a six-month cadence to a two-year cadence. The lion’s share of the development is sponsored by orgs like Red Had and they’ve publicly warned people that this may not continue into the future. See: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Ma... The comments about font rendering technology are relevant. You simply can’t use X font rendering to achieve what is, in 2020, considered to be the bare minimum for text presentation. Up until recently, this was papered over by libraries that could abstract over the differences between old-style X fonts and modern TTF fonts (TTF is almost as old as X!) For various reasons, the backwards compatibility was ditched a few months ago. The abstraction had just grown too unwieldy and had too many special cases.
  - dilandau 6y ago
    >not constantly changing equals it's end-of-life No, it just means that its stable. I understand that it's probably habit to justify constant changes to your software projects, but in my experience, it's a good thing to be conservative, and a very good thing to maintain compatibility over a very long span of time. EDIT: I swear, what is it with people opportunistically virtue-signalling on HN comments? Masks? Really?
    - bitwize 6y ago
      Ackshually, what happened was the X11 maintainers jumped ship to Wayland. Once again, just about everyone who knows thing one about graphics on Linux is on board with the Wayland transition. Just like everyone who knows thing one about virology or epidemiology is on board with social distancing and wearing a mask.
      - badsectoracula 6y ago
        > X11 maintainers jumped ship to Wayland. Some maintainers, last time i checked others like Keith Packard are working exclusively on Xorg. > Once again, just about everyone who knows thing one about graphics on Linux is on board with the Wayland transition. I know "thing one" about graphics on Linux and i'm certainly not on board with Wayland transition. > Just like everyone who knows thing one about virology or epidemiology is on board with social distancing and wearing a mask. That is not a good comparison.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      Compatibility comes at a cost—by supporting old users, sometimes you fail to support new users. This is not hypothetical, this is at the core of the problem with BDF fonts.
      - badsectoracula 6y ago
        How does supporting BDF fonts makes a project fail to support new users? It sounds like a problem with the library's architecture, not an unsolvable technical hurdle.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't do flamebait or name-calling here. It degrades discussion and evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    So what should i call what bitwize does in a comment below where he essentially writes that not being into Wayland is like not being into social distancing and wearing a mask?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dilandau 6y ago
Wayland fans: so desperate for traction that they'll snap up any chance to spread false information. Or maybe this commenter doesn't know the difference between gnome/pango and xorg/xft? Xorg isn't going anywhere for a very long time.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Of course I know the difference. Pango is part of the "new world" in which all text rendering is done client-side. BDF is the old X11 bitmap format, used for X11's server-side text rendering. It makes sense for Pango to move away from supporting it, as hardly anyone uses BDF anymore except for backward compatibility with legacy X applications, and the world is moving away from X. Matter of fact, rendering everything is moving to client side, hence why X is increasingly unnecessary, and why Wayland is designed the way it is. Oh, and among "Wayland fans" you can count just about everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics stack, except maybe for Keith Packard. So yes, getting traction is important, because no one wants to keep maintaining the broken X architecture. Xorg is largely maintained by Red Hat who have put it in "hard maintenance" mode with virtually no new development.
  - dilandau 6y ago
    Ah yes, the "new world" that the developers like and that ultimately complicates things for end-users, and obsoletes 30+ years of software in the process. I prefer stability.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      You want to talk complicating things for end users? Does "XF86Config" mean anything to you? X only got halfway decent when the KMS driver came out, migrating much of the video hardware functionality OUT of X and into the kernel. The X server is thus now largely a state tracker for an obsolete protocol. Meanwhile, Wayland has pretty much the same graphics server architecture that Windows and macOS had decades ago. It finally brings the Linux desktop architecture in line with the state of the art. There may be a rough transition period, but the faster the Linux community pulls together and rips the X band-aid off, the shorter that period will be.