Bitmap text renderer

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

> Ideally the best approach might be to pre-render using a tiny pango based
> text to png program, in the desired language, and put that in the initrd.
> Then if the pango plugin load fails, it looks in the prerendered directory
> for an image. Use a CRC of the text for the image filenames.
>
> This is in the case of wanting to flash up "Press esc for details", passwrd
> for / or swap...

So there was a recent thread on fedora-devel-list where Kevin Kofler
proposed that, too.

See

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg00207.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg00214.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg00225.html

We could do it, although it's unclear to me whether we should do it.
There isn't much advantage to being able to display text that early
and it's a big can of worms.

--Ray