<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); ">Okay, first, sorry Peter for the double post. I failed at using a mailing list, please forgive me, its my first time.</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); "><br></span></div>Oh wow. I did not expect this kind of response to my question. First of all, thank you Jamey Sharp, that answered my question exactly.<div>
<br></div><div>Thank you everyone else for their input, I've found this read to have been extremely enlightening and educational. There is much good information here I will take under consideration.</div><div><br></div>
<div>Carbon, by design, is going to support both core fonts and xft. I want it to mirror urxvt in features and be similarly small and light, and thats all that urxvt provides. I'm implementing core font support first because thats how I use urxvt myself as I don't need unicode. Right now its only slightly "heavier" then suckless' st project (heavier meaning modular), and thats all I'm aiming for, really.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Now, urxvt recommends turning off xft support unless you need unicode because core fonts are so much faster. I understand using core fonts directly isn't exactly the most modern of techniques, but for a terminal emulator dealing with monospaced fonts, its fast and light and does the job well. I understand ram and processor power is plentiful these days, but I can't help but feeling pango is overkill. Why waste cpu cycles when something more interesting can?</div>
<div><br></div><div>I understand now that there's a performance hit in querying a font, but it does only need to be done once. The font is queried at the start to determine a max character height and width and that information is used to build a "grid" of characters on screen. In my practice implementation of xcb core text rendering I got monospaced output of the contents of a text file rendered to screen in just over 100 lines. Sure it doesn't do unicode, but its simple and fast. Why complicate things with pango?</div>
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