Re: pixel fonts

Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com> wrote:
> An alternative to giving away outline fonts, is to use glyph servers
> that render an outline font into a bitmap of the size/resolution a
> client wants. One could perhaps even charge for creating the bitmap,
> though micropayments are still just getting started.

Yes.  Perhaps the X Font Server could at last come into its own.
It's not much good for anything else :-)  but the protocol does have
the vestages of micropayments in it.  They forgot kerning (although
Gallium have a font server that adds that) and they made a terrible
job of encodings in the sample implementation (don't know if Gallium
has fixed that; probably) but it is at least a possible base for
experimentation.

Of course, you'd also need a font server proxy... and its cache would
be an issue for micropayments.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin, SoftQuad Inc    | lq-text freely available Unix text retrieval
lee@sq.com +1 416 239 4801 | FAQs: Metafont fonts, OPEN LOOK UI, OpenWindows
SGML: http://www.sq.com/   |`Consider yourself... one of the family...
The barefoot programmer    | consider yourself... At Home!' [the Artful Dodger]

Received on Friday, 9 August 1996 15:40:46 UTC