Antialiased text on X11

[James Cloos]

There have been various pleas and debates on this posted on and off
over at least the past several months.

There are several options for doing this, but I beleive Cairo (cf
http://cairographics.org) is the best choice.

This would not be on top of the current X11 support, but parallel to
it (and to the mac and win gui support).  This leaves the X11 code
as is to support platforms w/o cairo and by keeping legacy stuff out
helps to ensure the new port is clean.

The Cairo team recently released version 0.4 but is about to change
the API considerably.  It looks unlikely that there will be any
significant API changes after this shakeup.  Any work on a cairo gui
for emacs should wait at least a fortnight or two to ensure a stable
API.  Which fits in well with getting 22.1 relased first.  :-)

This should provide a clean platform for antialiased text, overlays of
combining diacritics and other typographic features within the text
buffers and should work well for emacs applications like preview-latex,
xml modes with a similar intent or any graphics-heavy app.

-JimC
-- 
James H. Cloos, Jr. <address@hidden>

PS.  I can spend devel time on this, though will wait until
     cairo's api is settled.