Depending on external libraries

[Keith Packard]

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Around 14 o'clock on Mar 11, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> That would seem a step backwards - just because you no longer need any other
> font loader doesn't mean no one else will.  A company issuing an X release
> may want to load in a proprietary font rasterizer other than freetype.

>From this perspective, it's actually a step forward -- the font rasterizer
will not be configured at run time, so the vendor can link in whatever
rasterizer they like without fear that it will be accidentally disabled by
whatever weird X configuration tool the user happens to execute.

But, if there is widespread desire for loadable font rasterizers, I can't 
exactly stop people from making them work.  I don't see any value from my 
perspective as a KDE/Gnome user (neither of which use server-side fonts); 
perhaps other people will though.  

Really, the best place to add this kind of functionality is within FreeType
which provides a rich and stable extension API for new font access
mechanisms.  The FreeType folks have already offered that it would be nice
to include some dynamic font back-end loading mechanism within that library
for some systems.  That would solve server-side *and* client-side at the 
same time, which seems like a much better plan to me.

-keith



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