[debian-devel:10986] Re: ITP: xfs-xtt

[Henrique M Holschuh <hmh+debianml@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 17 Nov 1999, Stephen J. Carpenter wrote:
> I do not know enough about xfs-xtt to comment on it. In fact...this is the
> first I have known of its existance.

I've been using X-TT (compiled locally) for some time, and it does have some
advantages over the other two true-type servers available on the net (last
time I checked, about 6 months ago). X-TT deals quite well with huge fonts
with >1000 glyps, such as CJK fonts and massive stuff such as CyberBit, and
handles deferglyps well.

It also has an extension to the font-name (alias?) X11 files, which allow
for correction and manipulation of fonts, including producing bold fonts and
slanting them I think. These can be *very* handy for creating derivate forms
(italics? bold, monospace) when you don't have all variants and can't shell
the $$$ to get professional font packs (the Asian ones are very expensive
for a starving student, not to mention very hard to get in Brazil ;-) ).

> > If we really have both packages in the archive, it would be nice if they
> > could point out their pros and cons compared to the competing package in
> > their README.Debian's.

AFAIK if you need to use massive Unicode fonts, or CJK ones, get X-TT. It
was designed to work in deferglyphs mode and CJK fonts. Otherwise, you
should be fine with any of them. Actually, if you only have ISO-8859 fonts
on your system, X-TT might not be the best tool for the job.

> I supose it would be. The main difference I see is that xfs-xtt is probably
> a complete x font server AND truetype font server...which means it can
> serve normal X fonts and render truetypes and serve them up.

That's the way the one I use works, but then I compiled it using the X-TT
patch over XFree86's xfs, so that was to be expected :-)

> xfstt ONLY does the second part of that. Thus xfstt is not an xfs
> replacement

xfs-xtt probably handles both, if they applied the X-TT patch over the
regular xfs (which means you get exactly what you had with xfs, plus X-TT
extensions for TrueType fonts). Will install it and try it out.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh