Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

[qznc]

On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 02:23:07 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 20:33:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> You mentioned X11 to me before, when we talked about this idea 
>> over email.
>
> Ah yes. I think X's biggest problem though is that it doesn't 
> do *enough*. The protocol is fairly efficient for what it does, 
> but it just doesn't do enough so the commands aren't 
> particularly compact when you start to get fancier.
>
> For instance, in my crappygui.d, I used XDrawString to draw 
> text. This was the result: http://arsdnet.net/gui.png
>
> That's a true type font (Bitstream Vera Sans, a fairly good 
> looking font), but X doesn't support antialiasing.
>
> There's a library called Xft that draws fonts prettier. But how 
> does it work? Instead of sending DrawText(x, y, "hello world!") 
> to the display server, it uses a drawing library to render the 
> text as an image in the application, then sends that image to 
> the display server.
>
> And BTW if the display doesn't support the alpha blending 
> extension (the XRender extension), it first takes a partial 
> screenshot, does the blending in library, and sends that image 
> back!
>
> Note that the X protocol does not compress the image data. So 
> if you send a 100x30 pixel image of text, you're shooting some 
> 10 KB - or double that without XRender - down the network wire 
> instead of the .... idk exactly for sure, but I think it is 
> about 32 bytes to just send the draw instruction.

Font rendering is often application specific and very
  complex. This is why it is done client-side in X11 nowadays.

State of Text Rendering on Linux: http://behdad.org/text/