[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Don Y]

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Fri, 05 May 2006 @ 08:02 -0700, Don Y said:
> 
>> So, it knows about each application's resources and rewrites them?
> 
> No.
> 
> X does font rendering. However, in the past its font support was so crappy,
> that application libraries did their own font rendering and just used X to
> draw it. Gnome in particular still does too much work in Gnome, including
> redundant copies of font data.
> 
> This was slow and ugly.
> 
> Modern X servers use XRender and hardware acceleration to draw fonts, and has
> new features like anti-aliasing, TrueType support, and subpixel rendering.
> The X servers do a lot more of the work (all of it now?) for displaying high
> quality fonts, and it benefits even old applications.
> 
> However, for some reason, font rendering for X apps just does not look as good
> unless I have KDE running.
> 
> I have tried all manner of font configuration in X and my personal font config
> files, and it just doesn't look as good. I might just be missing something,
> but from comments I've read, I'm not the only one.

I don't know... But, I know that my PDF's look just as good
on an old X terminal as they do on a windows machine, etc.
But, that could be because xpdf uses t1lib to deal with the
fonts... (which are embedded in my PDFs)?

> As far as widgets go, many applications now draw widgets independently
> of KDE and Gnome if they are running alone.  However, if KDE or Gnome is
> loaded, they can make use of "engines" (I think that's what they are
> called) which do a better job of drawing.
> 
> Applications can also dynamically load things like Qt and GTK and use them
> instead of their own widgets, if they have an abstraction layer for drawing
> the GUI. I'm fairly certain that is how Firefox works, for example. If
> it doesn't see KDE or Gnome when it starts up, it draws its own widgets.
> Otherwise it can load code from the environment and use that.
> 
> Some applications just look butt ugly without KDE or Gnome running. Again,
> if there is a way to make them use better drawing engines without the full
> environment, I haven't figured out how.
> 
>> Or, does it only provide this ability to applications that have
>> been *modified* to "comply" with it?
> 
> If the application talks to X to do the work, like for fonts, then it
> benefits from the enhancements without modification.
> 
> For widgets, it has to have support, or load it dynamically.