[Xcb] Creating parameters for xcb_poly_text_8

[Ian Osgood]

On Oct 24, 2008, at 1:21 PM, Peter Harris wrote:

> Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
>> ... what I also don't know is the encoding of the
>> strings, my knowledge of X is simply too limited for that.
>
> The encoding is per-font, set (discovered? negotiated?) at  
> xcb_open_font
> time.
>
> XLFD section 3.1.2.12:
> http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xorg/doc/xorg- 
> docs.git;a=blob_plain;f=hardcopy/XLFD/xlfd.PS.gz
>
> (Yeah, it's a bit of a mess. It's no surprise that everyone seems  
> to be
> using Xft instead of core fonts these days)
>
> Peter Harris
> -- 
>      Hummingbird Connectivity - A Division of Open Text
> Peter Harris                    http://connectivity.hummingbird.com
> Research and Development        Phone: +1 905 762 6001
> peter.harris at hummingbird.com    Toll Free: 1 877 359 4866


Most folks are using newer, higher level toolkits like cairo, qt, and  
evas for client-side anti-aliased font rendering via the (similar)  
XRender text interfaces. I think both of these interfaces index  
"glyphs", which may or may not have a one-to-one mapping to character  
set encodings (for example, there might be special glyphs for  
ligatures between characters like in Zapfino).

Older apps like xterm still use xft. It would be an interesting  
exercise to make an "xcbft" which does away with the Xlib  
dependencies. For example, see this message from October 2006 for a  
port of Xft + pango to XCB:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xcb/2006-October/002193.html

Ian