Comment X is bad#2: Fonts really, really painful to use (Score 1) 539
Fonts under X were painful to use even by the standards of 1987 when X was introduced, and are just pathetic today.
With a Mac/Windows/BeOS graphics library, you as an application programmer just write code something like "Give me a Helvetica 10 point font in italic style". With X, you have to know the character set encoding, the foundry, the display resolution, the weight, ... all of which leads to those wonderful font names like
"-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70 -iso8859-1"
Ack! Even worse, this notation *has* to be used in X resource files and other preferences.
Now, there are people like page layout specialists who actually care whether the font comes from Adobe or Bitstream. But what they want is to be able to say "Switch from the Adobe font folder to Bitstream and redisplay", not the anal level of detail that X requires.
Worse still, X is still stuck with these awful bitmap formats, several years after Mac and Windows switched to outline. (BeOS was outline from the start.) I'm not sure exactly why, but the complexity of an X font specification compared to anyone else (the "m" in field 11 *might* be important to the user) no doubt contributes.
With a Mac/Windows/BeOS graphics library, you as an application programmer just write code something like "Give me a Helvetica 10 point font in italic style". With X, you have to know the character set encoding, the foundry, the display resolution, the weight,
"-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal--12-120-75-75-m-7
Ack! Even worse, this notation *has* to be used in X resource files and other preferences.
Now, there are people like page layout specialists who actually care whether the font comes from Adobe or Bitstream. But what they want is to be able to say "Switch from the Adobe font folder to Bitstream and redisplay", not the anal level of detail that X requires.
Worse still, X is still stuck with these awful bitmap formats, several years after Mac and Windows switched to outline. (BeOS was outline from the start.) I'm not sure exactly why, but the complexity of an X font specification compared to anyone else (the "m" in field 11 *might* be important to the user) no doubt contributes.
