[GRASS5] d.text2

[Glynn Clements]

Eric G. Miller wrote:

> I think it is a worthy endeavor.  I'm not clear on how X4 handles fonts
> these days, but I get the impression that it might be possibly to just
> use truetype fonts directly without needing explicit linkage to
> freetype.
> 
> I think the monitor code would have to change for this to
> work though (it could do the work on it's end for making appropriate X
> calls -- then we could ditch those hershey fonts).

Recent versions of XFree86 support TrueType fonts directly. Older
versions can use a font server which supports TrueType fonts (xfstt,
xfsft).

However, this approach would only work for XDRIVER; the CELL and PNG
drivers would still need to link against the freetype library. Also, X
only supports bitmap (1-bpp) fonts, whereas using freetype directly
would allow anti-aliasing.

I certainly wouldn't recommend adding TrueType support to the monitors
for 5.0; better to have a separate application which uses the
monitor's existing raster operations.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>