[luau] Mozilla 1.2.1 released

[Ray Strode]

>
>
>I saw that on the mirror, but was not sure what the difference between vanilla 
>and xft are.  What does xft stand for?
>  
>
I'm not sure what it stands for, but it's designed to fix the mess 
currently associated with X and fonts.  Basically, fonts are normally 
stored on the font server (the display part of X), which presents major 
headaches for programmers and application designers.  One such problem 
is, since the server is in charge of displaying its own fonts there is 
little opportunity for the client (the executing, cpu-using part of X), to
control how the font should be rendered.

Xft is a library for using fonts on the client-side.  It uses fontconfig 
for accessing fonts, freetype for rasterizing fonts, and the X Render 
extension (if available) for rendering the fonts.

fontconfig is a system setup for storing and retrieving fonts. 
 Basically, you drop a new font into a preconfigured directory and then 
the font is installed and usable.  Also, applications that use 
fontconfig, rather than having to specify big, nasty, X font 
descriptions (those long things with lots of hyphens and asterisks), can 
just ask for "Courier" or "Times".  And fontconfig will follow certain 
configurable heuristics for choosing the best font to reply with.  Note 
it has no dependency on X, so it is potentially useful for more than 
just X applications (for instance, printer drivers, or console-mode 
documentation packages).

freetype is a libary that can open font files (truetype, opentype, and 
other lesser formats) and convert fonts from their 
resolution-independent mathematical representations (as stored in the 
files) to pixels. This process is called rasterization.

X Render extension is an add-on for XFree86 (and the latest version of 
sun microsystem's version of X), which provides functions for 
compositing onscreen images.  This is particularly useful for making 
fonts look smooth, because font's are smoothed by bluring certain rough 
edges with the font's background.  This process is called rasterization.

So there is a lot of really cool technology behind xft, but the only 
thing you will probably notice is that it gives you smooth looking fonts.

--Ray