[mcclim-devel] newbie niggles and whines.

[Brian Mastenbrook]

On Jan 3, 2005, at 8:51 AM, David Golden wrote:

> 9.  Look-and-feel:  Antialiased fonts on linux by default.  Yes, 
> XRENDER
> etc. lowlevel support belongs in clx distribution, not McCLIM - but if
> it is available, McCLIM should really default to it at this stage on
> linux, IMHO.  Again, this is probably planned, but hey.

XRENDER doesn't do antialiased fonts; it simply has protocol primitives 
for drawing with alpha blending. All applications which use XRENDER to 
display antialiased fonts are also using the Freetype library (in the 
form of libXft) to do the displaying, which requires a nontrivial 
amount of FFI.

Now, there is a FFI binding to Freetype in the Experimental section, 
but it's for CMUCL only and I have no idea how to use it. IWBNI this 
worked on both SBCL and CMUCL, and maybe even used UFFI. The other 
option is to use Xach Beane's truetype-in-lisp to parse a few fonts and 
convert them to curves which can be loaded and displayed with no FFI. 
The Bitstream Vera family of fonts is under an open license for the 
GNOME project; dumping these in some kind of sexpr format describing 
the curves shouldn't be too hard, but drawing them is another matter.
--
Brian Mastenbrook
http://www.iscblog.info/
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~bmastenb/