Re: Why are so many people using font servers?
On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 05:02:07PM +1000, 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 single
> machine, i.e. they're not sharing the fonts over the network.
Right, that describes my setup accurately. And I feel that I can speak
knowledgeably to this insofar as I am a recently-inducted initiate
of the X-Windows Setup Hazing Academy(TM). I can write knowledgeably
about what it is that is faced by the new Debian users in trying to get
X set up. My ignorance IS my knowledge, in this sense, I mean.
> 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?
It's a rather large documentation gap, a big missing piece in the web of
Debian / Gnu-Linux (generally) info findable by the usual means that
users think to try (Google, debian.org, tldp.org, etc.). Of the
hypotheses enumerated above, it is "just not yet common knowledge" that
is the correct one. If one uses Google, one finds that large amounts of
documents exist (and are indexed by Google, Altavista et al) that are
pre-XFree86-4. There's been a slowdown, maybe tied to the slowdown in
the economy that has stressed potential or one-time contributors and so
the voluntary production of documentation seems to me to have undergone
a noticeable pause in the recent past.
Anyway, somewhewhere in the Debian setup reference material that I've
exposed myself to, this info about XFree864 TT font support being
already built-in is hidden too well. It might be as simple as editing
one sentence somewhere for broken grammar, or upping the font size
/weight, I don't know.
Of all the major pieces of my Debian system(s) that I have had to
contend with installing and configuring (in the last 5 months) on 3
Debian setups, X-Windows has been the one that I feel suffers the most
from a painful lack of centralization of documentation sources, lack of
coordination, lack of essential detail in the documentation that is
available, poor readability, and outdated-ness. It's one of those
situations that in my more paranoid moments I feel is allowed to
continue existing so that certain people can feel like mages to the rest
of us being muggles (Harry Potter reference for those who don't know).
In my saner moments of course I know that it just that the skills and
time of people who program X or write framebuffer drivers for new video
card hardware is a scarse and precious resource, especially for free
software, and those tired wizards aren't in the mood to struggle with
writing coherent documentation for newbies after they've done slaving
away over the drivers.
> 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.
I run xfs-xtt because its author seems to suggest that it does something
that the built-in TT font server support in current XFree86, does not.
However understanding how to enable (install) new fonts to it was a
MAJOR PITA because, bless him, the Japanese author has thus far been
unable to produce documents that are better than marginally coherent
English or are written on a level understandable by novices unfamiliar
with very low-level technical detail of font technology. I still don't
have it finished (I don't have printing working) because I just don't
understand how DeFoMa works (my second least-favorite Free Software
package of all time, after Gnu Automake).
--
See my OpenPGP key at https://savannah.gnu.org/people/viewgpg.php?user_id=6050
GnuPG public key fingerprint | "Only when efforts to reform society have as
BD26 A5D8 D781 C96B 9936 | their point of departure the reformation of
310F 0573 A3D9 4E24 4EA6 | the inner life -- human revolution -- will
they lead us with certainty to a world of lasting peace and true human security."
-- Daisaku Ikeda
Reply to: