shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) (04/14/87)
Now that we have a font editor, I want to know if I should build a font for an application of mine that uses about two dozen bitmaps (created and maintained using "bitmap"). Questions include relative average performance of writing font chars vs writing bitmaps (is there a noticeable difference and how much variation between implementations) and how programs ought to handle both (a real pain to have all those XStoreBitmaps, but how do people abstract the positions of entries in non-alphabetic fonts, or don't they bother?). Any info/suggests greatly appreciated. stan shebs shebs@cs.utah.edu
eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU.UUCP (04/15/87)
I am working on Foundation, a large X based WYSIRN (What You See Is Really Neat) editor for the Athena Writing project. Athena just got the Adobe fonts, as textfiles with lots of information in them. I wrote font reader routines and a front end to X which replaced all of the XText calls with my own routines to handle the bitmap fonts, and send the bitmaps over to the server. Relative performance: If you send the bitmaps every time, it is about 10-30 times slower than X fonts (this is on Xqvss on a MicroVax II, about 2Meg of ram.) If you cache them on the server, you can get better than this, but you can generally paint a full height, half width window in 6 seconds with caching, 30 seconds without, versus under 1/2 sec with normal Xfonts. In our installation, the X fonts are hardwired into a remote shared disk, so they can't be updated for easy experimentation... this is too bad, actually, since the existing fonts are poor, and in cases patently wrong... /Happy Hacking...........\ \.............Mark Eichin/