Re: Why are so many people using font servers?
On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 05:02:07PM +1000, Rob Weir wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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 used to use a font server on a purely local system, and it wasn't
because I needed TrueType support. It was because XFree86 3.x would
sometimes block while scaling fonts. It was pretty annoying to have the
X server completely hang for a few seconds just because I picked the
wrong font from a list. Using a font server instead was the solution,
xfs would scale the fonts instead.
I don't know if 4.x still has that problem, I certainly hope it's been
fixed by now. But even if it has it's quite possible that some people
still use it because that's what they did before.
--
Michael Heironimus
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