[9fans] plan9 font service [WAS: abaco @ plan9port]

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
>
> now another problem: abaco expects some fonts in
> /usr/local/plan9/fonts.
>
> Seems we need some convenient way for relocating fonts.
> Maybe an even an fontserver ? ;-)

I've now manually tweaked the pathes in the source, but this
isn't really a good solution ;-o

Maybe we should introduce some font server (maybe a little bit
like X has one). This font server represents all (virtually)
available raster fonts (even autogenerated or remotely fetched)
in some convenient namespace, so an client only has to open one
file to get an complete font. (maybe we should also invent some
complete-font file format instead of splitting them into subfonts
in the client's view).

In the end, an client should never directly access font files,
but instead query the font server.

BTW: an interesting thing would be an high-level display server,
which is capable of complex operations, eg. viewports, font and
image rendering (maybe something between X and windows' DCs ?).
The client would only have to send hi-level ops and leave the
dirty work to an (maybe hw accelerated) display server.


cu
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 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
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