Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!dsg.csc.ti.COM!Kimbrough
From: Kimbrough@dsg.csc.ti.COM (Kerry Kimbrough)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Optimizing around the server
Message-ID: <2796836727-15281645@Sierra>
Date: 17 Aug 88 19:05:27 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28


   > For example, our desk top publishing package will use XCopyArea
   > to render our fonts (held in pixmaps).  To display a whole page,
   > the performance is typically pretty bad because there is a XCopyArea
   > done for each character on the page.

Perhaps what you'd really like would be a way to make your proprietary fonts
available to X servers for use in servicing Poly/ImageText requests. That is, a
standard font format file for X. How about it, X Consortium?

On the other hand, if you need to render text in certain ways that are unknown
to the X protocol (e.g. anitaliased), you may be forced to rely upon generating
and copying images. 

Some of the trade-off of doing this client-side or server-side seem to be:

Client-side					Server-side
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My graphics code is fast		vs.	The server hw can draw to off-screen
						pixmaps.

I've got lots of memory or my paging	vs.     The server's got lots of memory
is fast						or its paging is fast.

The number of graphics requests to	vs.	The number of graphics requests
create the pixmap image is large w.r.t		to create the pixmap image is
the equivalent PutImage request			small w.r.t the equivalent
						PutImage request.