Date: Mon, 20 Feb 95 9:34:40 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: gibbs@estienne.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Justin T. Gibbs) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Netscape Font problem? Message-ID: <9502201634.AA03088@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199502200216.SAA07533@estienne.cs.berkeley.edu> from "Justin T. Gibbs" at Feb 19, 95 06:16:48 pm
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> My netscape binary works fine on my 486-66 #9-GXE system, but > displays garbage for fonts on my 486-33 Stealth 24 system. My > guess is that I've missed something configuration wise, but I > certainly can't find it. I've now got the same: > > XKeysymDB, Netscape binary, Xserver, and nls directory. > > Every other X app I have seems to work fine on the 486-33. > Anybody have an idea what could cause this problem? Netscape uses a technique called pixmap double-buffering to do its little animation and some other stuff. There are other techniques that result in better animation, but I've only seen a few people (like me) using them. Probably the fastest technique is unsuitable for NetScape, since it applies to images that are prerendered only. So anyway, NetScape creates a pixmap and uses it as a drawable. Apparently, there's no bounds checking for this kind of drawable. This is a well known problem. Increasing your window width so that images don't have to pan left-right will help somewhat. Netscape also has a memory leak (apparently) in its pixmap allocation, since not all allocated pixmaps get deallocated. This is most obvious when doing panning of a large amount of text from an FTP site where it attempts to buffer using the pixmaps. A 16M image size for the X server is not unheard of as a result. Finally, there appears to be a bug in XFree86 with regard to the internal font rendering. This will result in screwed up fonts after a while (the fonts in the font cache get trashed). The workaround is to use pre-rendered fonts instead of the outline font stuff. A simple way to do this is to chane over to Courier fonts. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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