Re: gEDA-user: PCB Gtk port

[Dave McGuire <mcguire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Feb 28, 2005, at 7:56 PM, Marvin Dickens wrote:
> Thing is, rendering modern fonts poses unique problems and is a fairly
> specialized area of programming. It's as much of an art as it is a 
> science.
> Poorly written font engines display jagged, fuzzy and otherwise bad
> representations of glyphs. Years ago, in the pre XFT days, your typical
> X desktop in Linux looked like sh!t. Now, Linux/*NIX users take good 
> font
> rendering for granted (Thanks to XFT).

  Well...Linux users, not Linux/*NIX users.

> IMHO, This is not a portability issue. But, even if you look at it 
> this way,
> portability at the cost of making the app look like and feel like it 
> was
> developed and written for a system in 1988 is a poor trade off for 
> 99.8 % of
> the user base of PCB.

  My current-model SunRay clients running current software on the 
current release of the OS is "1988"?  Umm no, I don't think so.  "Not 
Linux" does not mean "Not Current".

  Further, the fact that YOU use Linux on PCs does not mean "99.8% of 
the user base of PCB" uses Linux on PCs.

  Yet further...By its very definition an X11 "extension" is  optional. 
 You are suggesting that it is somehow acceptable to require an 
optional extension to the X server just to run this application.  That 
is nothing short of absurd.  It is possible to write this functionality 
in a portable way, and not sacrifice ANYTHING.

  The fact that you would willingly sacrifice portability (one of the 
original goals of the program we're discussing) for such fluff as 
ANTIALIASED FONTS IN PULL-DOWN MENUS is quite disturbing and frankly 
has no place here.  That's aside from the fact that they can be 
implemented JUST FINE in a portable way with no sacrifice whatsoever.  
Modern fonts are not the problem...as I've said repeatedly, the problem 
is not with Freetype, but with the mechanism Pango uses to get the 
Freetype-generated glyphs into the widgets.  Are you missing that 
point?

             -Dave

--
Dave McGuire              "I've watched Harley people throw up
Cape Coral, FL                      on the ceiling."    -Krissi