Re: [dwm] dwm's future

Hi,

2009/4/26 Szabolcs Nagy <nszabolcs_AT_gmail.com>:
> On 4/26/09, Christian Garbs <mitch_AT_cgarbs.de> wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 11:06:08PM +0100, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
>>> On 4/25/09, Christian Garbs <mitch_AT_cgarbs.de> wrote:
>>> > work, even without pango or cairo.  I have German umlauts as well as
>>> > Japanese characters (eg. web page titles from Firefox).
>>>
>>> try greek or cyrillic
>>> i had trouble with those when fonts were loaded with XCreateFontSet
>>
>> Looks ok to me:
>> https://www.cgarbs.de/tmp/dwm-ru.png
>
> no, that is ugly bold font, same problem with greek
>
>> Wrong font here?
>> https://www.cgarbs.de/tmp/dwm-ar.png
>
> most likely your font does not cover arabic fonts (iso8859-6) in the given size
>
>> Korean does look broken, though:
>> https://www.cgarbs.de/tmp/dwm-ko.png
>
> yes, i get the same result using fixed-14

With the font spec:

"-*-*-medium-*-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"

I'm able to get proper results including Japanese, Chinese, Korean,
Greek, Russian, Hebrew, and Thai with that. Though not all of them are
monospaced (Gree and Russian for instance).

Arabic doesn't work for me if I'm not increasing the size to 17 or
above which is huge... and that's hard to be monospaced anyways.

I had a look into pango, well and I agree having such a dependency is
not very nice, pango is quite complex for what we need, cairo is bad
either for what we require. These achieve pseudo-monospace'ing through
scaling, which ends up in more or less equally bad results as using
plain X fonts, though perhaps looking a little bit smoother because
one doesn't need to declare large fonts.

So there are only three ways:

- stick with what we got (don't care if some langs look ugly)
- use pango and/or cairo or something like that
- invest some effort into a new font rendering lib (seems to be a hard
job, esp. if one asks for proper font support which can't be done by
us)

So I think, we stick to what we got after all. The bar stays at it is.

I agree there are more interesting problems.

Kind regards,
--Anselm
Received on Sun Apr 26 2009 - 10:11:03 UTC