Re: xfree will be the best....

On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 09:26:43AM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
| However, there are a few operations which OpenGL doesn't efficiently 
| accelerate in some implementations, most notably the text operations ...

I think there's experimentation to be done there.  Straightforward
rendering of the glyph geometry works, integrates nicely with other
primitives, and is plenty fast on the three most recent generations of
hardware.  The open question is whether (or how much) multipass is
required to get acceptable antialiasing quality.

Other very interesting questions include whether hinting can be
implemented by vertex programs, and whether performance/quality can be
enhanced by breaking glyphs into curve-bounded "trapezoids" that can be
processed by vertex programs or evaluators without triangulation by the
host CPU.

Then there's the possibility of storing glyphs as textures, which could
be a pretty straightforward match for Render semantics.

|                        ... The compositing modes should be largely
| compatible with OpenGL, but the component-level compositing has no 
| equivalent in the OpenGL world that I'm aware of. ...

It can be handled by a fragment program.  The multiple alphas reside in
a texture that the program accesses.

Allen