Fonts in X11R6.8.1 Juliusz Chroboczek, <
[email protected]> 25 March 2004 1. Introduction This document describes the support for fonts in X11R6.8.1. Installing fonts (section 2., page 1) is aimed at the casual user wishing to install fonts in X11R6.8.1 the rest of the document describes the font support in moredetail. We assume some familiarity with digital fonts. If anything is not clear to you, please consult Appendix: Background (section 5., page 16) at the end of this document for background informa- tion. 1.1 Two font systems Xincludes two font systems: the original coreX11 fonts system, which is present in all implemen- tations of X11, and the Xft fonts system, which may not be distributed with implementations of X11that arenot based on X11R6.8.1 but will hopefully be included by them in the future The coreX11 fonts system is directly derived from the fonts system included with X11R1 in 1987, which could only use monochrome bitmap fonts. Over the years, it has been moreorless happily coerced into dealing with scalable fonts and rotated glyphs. Xft was designed from the start to provide good support for scalable fonts, and do so efficiently. Unlike the corefonts system, it supports features such as anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rasterisation. Perhaps moreimportantly,itgives applications full control over the way glyphs arerendered, making fine typesetting and WYSIWIG display possible. Finally,itallows applications to use fonts that arenot installed system-wide for displaying documents with embedded fonts. Xft is not compatible with the corefonts system: usage of Xft requires making fairly extensive changes to toolkits (user-interface libraries).