Re: Antialiased text on X11

[Jan D.]

> I'll stick my hand in the air here and say that I would favour people
> putting effort into Cairo support rather than Xft.
>
> Isn't Cairo being used in Gtk now?  Could we get Cairo for free by
> porting the buffer to Gtk?

GTK 2.6 does not use Cairo, the development version might.  As for 
"porting the buffer", I assume you mean that we should leave all 
redisplay to Gtk, by using for example the text widget?  Unfortunately 
the redisplay in that widget is crude and simple, and is only suitable 
for the most simple text editing tasks.

Getting Emacs to use Xft for all X ports is much more realistic.  Cairo 
is a moving target, and from what I have seen, we still need font 
metrics and the like to be able to handle redisplay.  Cairo only gives 
simple drawing primitives, this is not good enough.  I haven't seen the 
latest Cairo sources, so this might have changed.

But if we get font metrics from Cairo or Xft does not matter much, the 
porting work is roughly the same, so Xft is a much better target.  The 
drawing stuff is trivial in both cases.

        Jan D.