It doesn't support Unicode, doesn't support font antialiasing, and instead of fontconfig, you need to grapple with X11 core font support, using ttmkfdir and friends, and make the X11 server aware of where the fonts are.

It's some experience I definitely don't miss from those days.

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joz1-k 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, yes, I remember those early times as well. :) The question is whether it's possible to maintain the legacy API and upgrade the internal architecture to use more modern approaches. I think it's almost always possible, but perhaps the cost to develop and maintain such a legacy layer is too high for an open-source desktop environment and toolkit. The Windows OS managed to support old APIs quite well, but the available resources are incomparable.

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floam 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you sure no antialiasing? No subpixel for sure.

I think I have some rusty memory of LD_PRELOAD my own .so with AA enabled (special patch? I don’t recall) with a game’s installer I shipped to get the statically linked GTK+1.2 Loki Games setup utility looking modern. That plus a QUITE SPIFFY looking splash bitmap slapped onto it would hopefully let the installation complete before anyone realized it was a creaky old thing.

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floam 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Oh yes. I present you gtkaa:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231129124306/http://alx14.free...

	▲	WesolyKubeczek 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		…and recompile mozilla and nautilus and maybe all other stuff using gtk1… As someone who used to build Mozilla suite back when their gtk2 support was experimental, I’d say this is too much faff.

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Findecanor 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

GTK 1.x used GDK which was a thin veneer on top of Xlib, and I think it defaulted to use Xlib calls for text rendering.

If the X server supported antialiased text (and subpixel rendering) then GTK should have done too.

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vidarh 3 days ago | parent [-]

Do any X servers do? Antialiased text on X is generally done by rendering the glyphs client side.

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anthk 3 days ago | parent [-]

They did with the XFT font server?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server

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vidarh 2 days ago | parent [-]

Did it? I can't find documentation that suggest it returned antialiased font data. The server could of course request a larger font size and scale it down, but did any do that?

I'm not questioning that it'd be possible to render antialiased fonts server side as there's nothing in X that really prevent it, I just don't recall that being a thing, rather than upgrading apps to use Xrender to render fonts client side and send the servers and atlas of pre-rendered glyphs the way we currently do.

I could very well be wrong - I didn't do much X programming in the brief period it'd have been relevant.

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anthk 2 days ago | parent [-]

Back in the day there was a font server for antialiased fonts, xfstt:

https://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue28/ayers1.html

That was what I was looking for.

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vidarh 2 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the pointer, but from the page you linked to:

> Even though xfstt doesn't do any anti-aliasing of the fonts (since there's no support for this in X)

The page it links to for xfsft as well, says this:

> Although FreeType does support font smoothing, the modified libfont.a does not. Adding font smoothing to X would require a major change to the system: in X, glyphs are (monochrome) bitmaps, and there is no support for using pixmaps as glyphs. Changing this would require the design and implementation of an extension to both the X protocol and the font server protocol, and changing applications to use the extensions.

It goes on to link to the Xrender extension as a solution.

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anthk 2 days ago | parent [-]

Well, my fault again. I remember a daemon doing XFT rendering for plain X, from Debian Woody days.

	▲	vidarh a day ago \| parent [-]
		You were half right which is something for stuff this old. I'd entirely forgotten about the font servers, and looking at them, at least xfsft does use FreeType/Xft. It's just that it's still rendering to monochrome bitmaps. It'd have been a logical extension to figure out the changes to support AA for them as well, so it's a reasonable assumption, especially given the short cutover before Xrender took over and we started getting AA most places. Indeed, Xrender provides all the server-side infra that'd have made it easy-ish to do, by allowing glyph sets with depth... In retrospect it's also surprising that it wasn't done, because it wouldn't instantly given AA to a lot of applications "stuck" on server side font rendering...

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anthk 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Motif was improved with XFT/Fontconfig support. GTK1 can be patched too'

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tiahura 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder how many llm tokens are burned dealing with Unicode issues?