what about....

what about....

Pretty much any application ends up needing font metrics on the client side to handle things like wrapped text, or sizing a widget to fit a string of text.

The old font system had a number of problems related to this, namely:

• To determine the metrics of a font at a particular size, it would rasterise it. This gets expensive for large fonts or large font sizes.
• As i18n has improved, today's fonts have more glyphs than those in the past. This increases the cost of determining the metrics ...
• While the font information provided by the old font system was okay for basic rendering of latin text, it completely fails for certain scripts that require complex shaping. The information needed to render these fonts are usually found in OpenType tables that are not exposed.

Now if you are running into speed problems with client side font rendering to remote displays, there are a few things you should check. The most important one is to check if the display supports the RENDER extension.

If it does not, then you should get a noticeable speed increase by disabling anti-aliasing. With anti-aliasing enabled but without RENDER, the X client downloads the background pixmap underneath where it will render the text, composites the text locally then sends the result back to the server. With anti-aliasing disabled, it can simply send the glyphs to the server to draw directly (which is comparable to what happens in the RENDER case, anti-aliased or not).

Why can't Xft (or Xrender) make this check for you at client connection 
time? There's really no excuse for requiring users to know this sort of 
black magic just because they want to connect to an old X server.

Well, running an application locally against an old RENDER-less X server gives reasonable
performance, so it isn't clear that always disabling anti-aliasing is the best default on such
servers -- it really depends on the bandwidth and latency.

I guess the real answer to your question is that it isn't a high priority of the developers.
They are putting their effort into improving performance when used against non-obsolete X
servers (effort that helps in the remote X case as well).  Given that there is only so much
they can do, I don't blame them.

Oh yes, agreed: this is a whinge that's getting rapidly less important 
over time. Probably against the installed base of X servers it's entirely 
insignificant by now, not least because exceed and other incredibly 
obsolete X11R4/5 Windows-based X servers have been comprehensively 
outcompeted by Cygwin's X server :)

My bad, I was unclear in what I was saying. I did not mean to say that the old font system was
superior, as it clearly lacked many features needed for fast high quality text rendering. What
I do belive is that a font rendering system that rasterizes fonts on the server side but gives
access to font metrics on the client side as well should be possible to create, thus giving
you full performance and full access to graphical goodies. The best way to do this with as
little latency as possilbe might be to allow the client to calculate font meterics but leave
all actual rendering to the server.

Sun tried this with STSF:

    http://stsf.sourceforge.net/about.html

It was not exactly a success, but did offer some benefits over fontconfig/Xft if you were
running hundreds of X servers from a single machine.  When running just a single X server,
these benefits were not apparent and the increased complexity for developers is a clear minus.

I completely missed the existence of stsf, thank you for the pointer.

I read up a bit on why it failed, and the main reason (judging from mailing list posts, at
least) seems to be that the various X hackers (e.g. Havoc Pennington and various GTK hackers)
felt that fontconfig was good enough. And in all fairness, that is probably completely true if
you don't care about network transparency. I've never heard any other serious criticism
against fontconfig except for the client side rendering issue.