Re: Releasing Xft2 and Fontconfig

Around 12 o'clock on May 28, Olivier Chapuis wrote:

> - The output of xft-config --libs gives:
> 
>         -L/opt/Xft/lib -lxft ...etc. 

Oops. (fixed now).

> - First I've compiled your packages with freetype-2.0.6. So there
> is no FT_Get_Next_Char function and this function is defined in
> fontconfig/src/fccharset.c. It seems that this definition leads to
> an infinite loop somewhere. With such build a simple programs as:

I haven't tested without FT_Get_Next_Char in quite a while; that function 
dramatically reduces the time it takes to scan fonts for available glyphs, 
so it may not be an infinite loop you're seeing, just a long delay.  With 
any reasonable number of fonts (~100), scanning the available fonts can 
take 15 or 20 seconds.  Note that if you've run fc-cache, there shouldn't 
be a delay.

> - XftDrawStringUtf8 does not seem to work.

This (and XftTextRenderUtf8) were both broken.

> XftDrawString8 assumes that the string "encoding" is iso8859-1

That's only because ucs-1 == iso8859-1; all of the Xft APIs use Unicode 
encodings.

> Can we display other encoding than iso8859-1 (as iso8859-15)
> with XftDrawString8?

No, but feel free to use iconv, or some other suitable conversion 
mechanism, when sending data to Xft.  I strongly encourage people to use a 
Unicode encoding internally throughout their applications and perform 
these conversions when interacting with the file system.  UTF-8 requires 
only a modest amount of additional memory for most western languages.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab