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GTK 1.x used GDK which was a thin veneer on top of Xlib, and I think it defaulted to use Xlib calls for text rendering. If the X server supported antialiased t

GTK 1.x used GDK which was a thin veneer on top of Xlib, and I think it defaulted to use Xlib calls for text rendering. If the X server supported antialiased text (and subpixel rendering) then GTK should have done too.

vidarh 1y ago
Do any X servers do? Antialiased text on X is generally done by rendering the glyphs client side.
- anthk 1y ago
  They did with the XFT font server? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server
  - vidarh 1y ago
    Did it? I can't find documentation that suggest it returned antialiased font data. The server could of course request a larger font size and scale it down, but did any do that? I'm not questioning that it'd be possible to render antialiased fonts server side as there's nothing in X that really prevent it, I just don't recall that being a thing, rather than upgrading apps to use Xrender to render fonts client side and send the servers and atlas of pre-rendered glyphs the way we currently do. I could very well be wrong - I didn't do much X programming in the brief period it'd have been relevant.
    - anthk 1y ago
      Back in the day there was a font server for antialiased fonts, xfstt: https://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue28/ayers1.html https://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue28/ayers1.html That was what I was looking for.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        Thanks for the pointer, but from the page you linked to: > Even though xfstt doesn't do any anti-aliasing of the fonts (since there's no support for this in X) The page it links to for xfsft as well, says this: > Although FreeType does support font smoothing, the modified libfont.a does not. Adding font smoothing to X would require a major change to the system: in X, glyphs are (monochrome) bitmaps, and there is no support for using pixmaps as glyphs. Changing this would require the design and implementation of an extension to both the X protocol and the font server protocol, and changing applications to use the extensions. It goes on to link to the Xrender extension as a solution.
        anthk 1y ago
        Well, my fault again. I remember a daemon doing XFT rendering for plain X, from Debian Woody days.
        vidarh 1y ago
        You were half right which is something for stuff this old. I'd entirely forgotten about the font servers, and looking at them, at least xfsft does use FreeType/Xft. It's just that it's still rendering to monochrome bitmaps. It'd have been a logical extension to figure out the changes to support AA for them as well, so it's a reasonable assumption, especially given the short cutover before Xrender took over and we started getting AA most places. Indeed, Xrender provides all the server-side infra that'd have made it easy-ish to do, by allowing glyph sets with depth... In retrospect it's also surprising that it wasn't done, because it wouldn't instantly given AA to a lot of applications "stuck" on server side font rendering...

vidarh 1y ago

Do any X servers do? Antialiased text on X is generally done by rendering the glyphs client side.

anthk 1y ago
They did with the XFT font server? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server
- vidarh 1y ago
  Did it? I can't find documentation that suggest it returned antialiased font data. The server could of course request a larger font size and scale it down, but did any do that? I'm not questioning that it'd be possible to render antialiased fonts server side as there's nothing in X that really prevent it, I just don't recall that being a thing, rather than upgrading apps to use Xrender to render fonts client side and send the servers and atlas of pre-rendered glyphs the way we currently do. I could very well be wrong - I didn't do much X programming in the brief period it'd have been relevant.
  - anthk 1y ago
    Back in the day there was a font server for antialiased fonts, xfstt: https://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue28/ayers1.html https://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue28/ayers1.html That was what I was looking for.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      Thanks for the pointer, but from the page you linked to: > Even though xfstt doesn't do any anti-aliasing of the fonts (since there's no support for this in X) The page it links to for xfsft as well, says this: > Although FreeType does support font smoothing, the modified libfont.a does not. Adding font smoothing to X would require a major change to the system: in X, glyphs are (monochrome) bitmaps, and there is no support for using pixmaps as glyphs. Changing this would require the design and implementation of an extension to both the X protocol and the font server protocol, and changing applications to use the extensions. It goes on to link to the Xrender extension as a solution.
      - anthk 1y ago
        Well, my fault again. I remember a daemon doing XFT rendering for plain X, from Debian Woody days.
        vidarh 1y ago
        You were half right which is something for stuff this old. I'd entirely forgotten about the font servers, and looking at them, at least xfsft does use FreeType/Xft. It's just that it's still rendering to monochrome bitmaps. It'd have been a logical extension to figure out the changes to support AA for them as well, so it's a reasonable assumption, especially given the short cutover before Xrender took over and we started getting AA most places. Indeed, Xrender provides all the server-side infra that'd have made it easy-ish to do, by allowing glyph sets with depth... In retrospect it's also surprising that it wasn't done, because it wouldn't instantly given AA to a lot of applications "stuck" on server side font rendering...