FWIW, I just committed a few things to the experimental Xft branch.
The most important are
(1) A workaround for a nasty crash in the Athena widgets.
(2) Fixes for build problems, including a first hack at autodetecting
the location of the freetype includes.
(3) A more sane way to configure subsets of XEmacs functionality for Xft.
The reason to bother with (3) is that unfortunately (1) is a
systematic problem. The current architecture assumes that text
rendering engines are in a 1-1 relationship with device types, but
that's not true with Xft. In particular, none of the widget sets we
support on X11 (except possibly GTK+) can use Xft to render text.
Although I've only worked with Xaw7 and Xaw3d, I have to assume all
the others are vulnerable to the same kind of problem.
Fixing this correctly will require an architectural change, I'm
afraid.
You can look at the patch on xemacs-patches
<87fz2ewt9d.fsf(a)tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>, or you can just check it
out with branch tag "-r sjt-xft".
--
Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering University of Tsukuba
http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/ Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Economics of Information Communication and Computation Systems
Experimental Economics, Microeconomic Theory, Game Theory