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...