OpenGL, xserver, and anti-aliased fonts

On Mar 5, catach-m/[email protected] wrote:
 > I'm not sure of the current state of the OpenGL libraries in this new xserver, 

There was a lot of discussion last November/December about how to
re-architect the X server so that it can sit on top of OpenGL rather
than custom video drivers. I think various people are currently off
working on different pieces of that puzzle.

 > so thought i'd better ask :) A topic I am considering researching that i'm told
 > was discussed here earlier (although i couldn't find it in the mail archives)
 > is using the OpenGL pipeline and GPU to accelerate anti-aliased
 > font rendering.

In January, Marcelo E. Magallon pointed out the FTGL library which
uses FreeType with OpenGL:

	http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xserver/2004-January/000624.html

 > Specifically what i want to know is if this new xserver has enough GL support
 > already included to be able to do such development and testing/benchmarking 
 > (can you tell i don't really know what i'm talking about yet? :) ). Would it be
 > worth an in depth look at Cairo and it's anti aliased text for such a project? Cairo
 > does anti aliased text inside software and texture memory, correct?

Cairo just uses FreeType to render glyphs, and then composites those
glyphs using one of its backends, (eg. XRender or OpenGL). The first
two screenshots from the following page:

	http://www.cs.umu.se/~c99pnn/twiki/bin/view/Main/Screenshots

show that with either the Xrender or OpenGL backend, text is
antialiased, (though in this case geometric shapes are only
antialiased in the XRender screenshot).

-Carl