ANNOUNCEMENT
		    Hewlett-Packard Contributed Font Server
			Enhancements Publicly Available
			       February 24, 1992


Hewlett-Packard Company has donated a collection of font server
enhancements to the X Consortium for distribution as contributed
software.  The enhancements add a set of useful typographic capabilities
to scalable fonts in X, without requiring any changes to the X or the F
(font server) protocol.

The enhancements are intended to serve applications that require certain
limited typographic capabilities, but do not need the full (and as yet
undefined) typographic extension.  Capabilities supported by the
enhancements are font rotation, artificial obliquing (changing glyph
slant), anamorphic scaling, and mirroring.

Applications using the enhancements can render text at any angle, and
can create many variations on a scalable font by employing the new
transformations.  The enhancements are accessed via backward-compatible
extensions to the XLFD (X Logical Font Description) naming semantics,
and do not require any changes or extensions to the existing
client/server communications protocol.

While the enhancements provide access to a set of useful typographic
effects, they are not intended to serve as a substitute for the X
typographic extension.  Many issues that must be addressed by the
typographic extension, such as kerning, subpixel positioning, anti-
aliasing, scalable metrics, and warping, are not addressed by these
enhancements.  Rather, these enhancements are intended to serve the
large class of applications that need more capable text rendering but do
not need advanced typographic capabilities.

Those wishing to obtain the enhancements, or more information about
them, can obtain the following files via anonymous ftp on
export.lcs.mit.edu, in the /contrib/hp_xlfd_enhancements directory:

  -rw-r--r--  1 ftp      ftp         41743 Feb 24 22:00 hp_xlfd_demo.tar.Z

    A tarfile containing two illustrations of the capabilities
    available with the enhancements.  Includes two XWD files of sample
    output, and the two programs used to generate that output.

  -rw-r--r--  1 ftp      ftp         14172 Feb 24 22:04 hp_xlfd_enhancements

    A detailed description of the capabilities and how they are accessed
    and used.

  -rw-r--r--  1 ftp      ftp         43922 Feb 24 22:02 hp_xlfd_patches.tar.Z

    Code changes to implement the enhancements, in the form of patches
    for font server source files.

For more information, please contact Nathan Meyers at Hewlett-Packard
Company, nathanm@cv.hp.com.