David...
Thanks for the helpful response....
- the client sends these glyph bitmap images to the X Server through
the XRender extension.
The X Server globally caches them.
- when the client needs to draw some text, it simply sends the
positions and glyph 'indices' needed
to the X Server, the latter retrieves the bitmaps from its global
cache, and performs the composition on the target drawable.
Wow... I can't believe I'm doing it all wrong. Do you know where I can
find more information on XRender? The normal google/man search didn't
yield too many results.
Also.... what is the standard way of displaying freetype font glyphs
on MS Windows? Like on linux, I composite my own bitmaps and then blit
them to the screen using BitBlt.
To get back to your point, if you use some sort of glyph bitmap
cache, your performance will probably be dominated by the composition
code that you'll be using to draw the glyphs into your in-memory
bitmap, as well as the network transfer of the result. The
performance of FreeType will be totally irrelevant.
Freetype was never the problem.... its really fast! And believe it or
not, compositing the freetype glyphs into bitmaps is fast too (as long
as you cache them). I was more worried about transferring the bitmaps
over a slow X connection. But, as you said, if I can get get the X
server to cache them some way or another, that won't be a problem.
Thanks a lot!
Michael
It will be much slower than a simple XDrawString, because this one
can be hardware accellerated by
the X Server. However, note that XDrawString is incapable of
performing anti-aliased text rendering.
Hope this helps,
- David Turner
- The FreeType Project (www.freetype.org)
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