[sugar] X fonts, and Cairo fonts

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 12:21 +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On Mar 14, 2007, at 12:10 , Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> 
> > And anyway it seem sane to try and be resolution independent (both  
> > dpi and actual screen size/ratio).
> 
> Given fixed hardware and severe performance limits, is this still  
> "sane"? Isn't the XO much more like a game console than a PC in the  
> sense that optimizing to that specific hardware gets you much more  
> than you could ever achieve by trying to be general? For example,  
> like in game development, you could have the original artwork be  
> resolution-independent but then you pre-render this to the resolution  
> that it's actually needed at.

Given the current architecture (cairo, svg, layout system), from a
performance point of view, I think resolution independence comes
basically for free. We are already doing device to user transformations.

>From a code complexity point of view, once HippoCanvas is made a little
smarter I think it would be transparent.

It has some design costs (a certain design will work better at a certain
resolution), but we don't have to pay it now. We can optimize design on
the XO resolution.

The advantages seems a lot:

* I don't care about screen rotation a lot at the moment. But when we
will have a touchscreen I will care. (when rotated the screen size in
pixels and the ratio is different).
* We can make Sugar feel good also on traditional laptops. That's
important if nothing else for development. Also this is probably a long
term thing but... I'd like to be able to use the stuff we are working
on.
* If the screen size/ratio changes in some future revision, reoptimizing
sugar for it will be easier.

In the end, I don't think it's an absolute requirement, but it's nice to
have and I don't see a reason to not do it.

Marco