Re: gEDA-user: PCB Gtk port

[Daniel Nilsson <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 04:09:59PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Feb 28, 2005, at 3:34 PM, Mario Klebsch wrote:
> >>I've built GTK+ on Solaris 8 / SPARC, it does work but will require
> >>some thought since the Solaris Xserver doesn't support the same set of
> >>extensions that the Xfree86 server does (Xrender). So you typically
> >>run into trouble building freetype and related stuff though.
> >
> >I must admit, that I do no tunderstand, why a basic GUI toolkit is 
> >required to be able to to TrueType and Type1 font processing. We are 
> >not building a word processor.
> 
>   Yes, it is ridiculous for GTK+ to *require* fancy font-handling 
> techniques for applications that do not require them.  Doing TrueType 
> fonts and antialiasing for menu choice is just plain excessive.
> 
>   Especially when it means the application will only run under Linux.

Why do you say that? GTK+ application runs under a wide variety of
operating systems.

>   I think the situation would be much better if GTK+ were able to be 
> built either with or without Pang/XFT/Xrender/etc, and just use X's 
> regular font system.  That would cut the number of dependencies down to 
> something manageable, and it would restore portability.

I disagree. What I believe is needed in the current situation related
to fonts and X is not more options and ways to configure things, it's
less options. I think what happened was that there was a need for
better looking fonts under X and many different and incompatible
libraries were developed to support this. Now it finally seems like we
are at a point were things are converging around freetype2 and it's
dependencies. Lets not try to go back and add more configuration
options - it's hard enough to configure a working font system as it is
and I wouldn' like to see applications that now requires me to tweak
yet another aspect of the fonts installed on my box.

-- 
Daniel Nilsson