Re: what is the status of the XFT branch?

[Jan D.]

Kenichi Handa wrote:
> Actually, after reading codes of XFT branch, I started to
> design a new font handling mechanism.  The basic plan is to
> use multiple font-backends drivers (xcore, xft, windows,
> bdf, atm, etc).  The main motivation for this rewriting is
> that the current XFT code in the branch is very difficult to
> utilize fontconfig's help for font selection, and to drive
> OTF fonts.  And also, I want to clean up the current fairly
> complicated font related codes (including many HAVE_XFT
> conditionals, many XLFD parsing code, etc).

This is a good idea, currently Emacs have too much XLFD knowledge builtin 
(i.e. in face specifications) which makes the XFT code more complicated.

> But, as there are many other works to be done, the progress
> for the above code is slow.  Please don't expect a quick
> response on this matter.  Anyway, here's the current font.h
> file (not yet fully considered) with which you may get a
> feeling of the design.

At first glance it looks good.  I guess the details will work themselves out 
when this is applied to various font mechanisms.  I imagine some things that 
are available for some font drivers are not available for others.  Maybe there 
is a bit of speed overhead also, as current Emacs accesses the X font struct 
directly.  But I guess it wont be noticable.

        Jan D.