Rob Weir wrote:
Hi y'all, I've noticed that a lot of people (both here and on #debian on OPN) are using font servers with X (xfs, xfstt, xfs-xtt, etc, etc) on a singlemachine, i.e. they're not sharing the fonts over the network.Why is this? XFree86 has been able to handle TrueType fonts (along with Type1, bitmap, etc) directly since version 4, so what's up? Am I missing some important feature here, or is it just not yet common knowledge that font servers are now (and have been since XFree86 4 was released a long time ago) unnecessary for 99% of workstations? I'm especially curious, since I've seen people running two (or more!) font servers on the one machine, which seems unnecessary (and wasteful) even if they were sharing over the network.
As mentioned above, a font server is very useful when it is accessed through the network. But it is also even more useful when used in a multi-OS environment.
Once your favorite app, requesting specific fonts, is installed on your Debian system and your font server is running, you know that you will be able to redirect this app to the X server of whatever machine running XYZ os with no pain (you just want to configure your X servers accross your lan to access the right font server).
If you don't, risk is high that an ugly fallback font will be used instead of the one requested by your application.
Of course, font server is useless on standalone machines, which concerns a lot of people (you don't want to access a font server across the internet!)
Cheers Eric