grahamd@MUNNARI.OZ.AU (01/12/91)
> Does anyone know whether Andrew will run successfully under Sun's > OpenWindows, or do we have to have MIT X? We are looking to reduce the > amount of time we put into administering our X software, and one > possibility is to chuck the MIT X stuff in favor of OpenWindows. We'd > be interested in any opinions or data on the pros and cons of this > approach. We use both MIT X and OpenWindows, we are heading to OpenWindows for the same reason that you are. We have had one major problem though with getting Andrew to work properly under OpenWindows. Note: we only have Andrew patched to No 6 due to the SunOS4.1 problems, even though No 9 is out we have updated the src yet. Also, our Andrew was still compiled under MIT X, not OpenWindows. The problem is related to fonts. Basically, the converted fonts don't behave exactly like they do under MIT X, it is something to do with their widths. The problem manifests itself if you run ez on a document, what happens is that you get places in the text where there should be a space, however the individual font characters come out too wide and the space doesn't show. Also if you select a region, the inverted area doesn't match exactly the area you selected, sometimes starting halfway through a character. I have mailed on the andrew mailing list about this before and received no replies from anyone giving either a solution or expressing that they have the same problem. It could be just that I am converting the fonts wrongly, but since I am the only one who has posted on the mailing list saying what I think you have to do to convert them, I don't know. I even ftp'd at one point the converted fonts that someone else had made available, however had exactly the same problem. On another point, I have also had trouble with Andrew fonts when converted to MacX. Basically fdbbdf doesn't put enough of the information expected by some conversion programs, in the bdf file it creates. This results in the conversion program failing for that font, or producing a font that doesn't work properly. Any help with these problems would be appreciated. Graham Dumpleton (grahamd@otc.otca.oz.au)
janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) (01/12/91)
We are running it under OpenWindows 2.0, no problems, once you have the
fonts converted. Here's a script which will turn a directory full of
.bdf font files into a directory suitable for OpenWindows -- it assumes
that the OpenWindows binaries are on your path:
#!/bin/csh
# Usage: convertfontdir dirname
#
cd $1
foreach font (`ls *.bdf`)
set fontname = `egrep '^FONT ' $font | sed -e 's/FONT //'`
convertfont -n $fontname -f 200 $font
end
awk '{printf("(%s) (%s) _FontDirectorySYN\n",$1,$2)}' <fonts.alias
>Synonyms.list
bldfamily -f 200
In terms of performance, the OpenWindows server, xnews, seems to be
*much* better than MIT X11 for graphics operations *if* one has a GX
board, but about the same otherwise. The X request that Andrew uses to
draw text (PolyText8) does not seem to be optimized in the xnews server
any better than in the MIT server. I've heard grumbling about the speed
of input dispatching under xnews; window dragging is notoriously slow;
some NeWS operations still crash the server. But it is commercially
supported, so these are presumably fixable problems.
Billdatri@convex.com (Anthony A. Datri) (01/13/91)
>The problem is related to fonts. Basically, the converted fonts don't behave >exactly like they do under MIT X, it is something to do with their widths. I've noticed an occasional overlapping pair of characters. The only reason I bother with OW at all is because some of my users have to run various tools (Valid, AutoCad, etc..) that still have suntools on the brain. I've found the xnews server to be too quarky to use as our default X environment. The lack of the shape extension is annoying, and the strangeness with colormap cells reserved to NeWS seems to have side effects. When running xnews on my shiny new color SS2, for example, a remote xloadimage will crash the server, although a local one won't. Since we have x11r4 everywhere, and ow2 only in some places, I just trashed ow2's redundant libraries in favor of the MIT ones. -- -- 336996351123355369963511235117*47*8*47*8*7471
csb@gdwb.oz.au (Craig Bishop) (01/14/91)
grahamd@MUNNARI.OZ.AU writes: >The problem is related to fonts. Basically, the converted fonts don't behave >exactly like they do under MIT X, it is something to do with their widths. >The problem manifests itself if you run ez on a document, what happens is that >you get places in the text where there should be a space, however the >individual font characters come out too wide and the space doesn't show. Also >if you select a region, the inverted area doesn't match exactly the area you >selected, sometimes starting halfway through a character. I have seen the same sort of thing but not under andrew. I believe that I converted the fonts correctly but overlapping occurs. I had a thought that maybe the fonts are the correct size but that the character spacing and line spacing is different. Does anyone have a comment on this. -- Craig Bishop Geelong & District Water Board Phone: +61 52 262506 61-67 Ryrie St Geelong Fax: +61 52 218236 Victoria 3220 Australia