[tex-live] Metafont fonts and X (font server?)

[George N. White III]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Frederik Hohlfeld
<frederik.hohlfeld at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there a way to use Metafont fonts with X? Apart from generating them and
> converting them to other bitmap formats before using them. I'm thinking about
> some way to generate them as needed from the Metafont source, maybe using a font
> server.

My guess is that the X font machinery doesn't really have all the
capabilities needed to
support maths layout, so it may not be enought just to get bitmaps.

Now that Display PS is officially gone <http://wiki.x.org/wiki/ChangesSince68>,
you may want to look at the successors based on Xrender. Quoting from.
 <http://dps.sourceforge.net/>:

------ begin quote
At the time when I started this project, there was no decent rendering
interface for X11 other than DPS.

Since then, there has been a large amount of work on a simple and
clean X server extension, Xrender, which provides the basis for just
such an interface.

Rendering libraries that are being built above Xrender include:

    * Xft, a font rendering library built on FreeType;
    * Cairo, formerly Xr/Xc, a geometry rendering library that
provides PostScript-like rendering primitives but with intrinsic
support for Porter-Duff compositing (transparency);
    * Pango, a high-level typesetting library.

If your application uses DPS, please consider porting it to the above
libraries.
 ------- end quote

> Is that just a pipe dream? If so, is it because there's no implementation or
> because there's no conceivable way to achieve this?

I think because much of the effort that went into X11R7 was aimed at
supporting m18n,
(so wide fonts, flexible layout), there is little interest in the
original X11 font technology.


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia