Re: crossfire

> Every pixmap would need to be in a separate file, too, leading to lots
> of small files chewing up disc space. The way it is now, you can
> delete all the bitmaps after you've assembled the font.

There's no particularly good reason that pixmaps can't be compiled into
the executable.

> Using a font is fast: You can draw a whole line at once in monochrome,
> ie. minimum protocol overhead. When you draw one character, you send
> one byte, when you send a monochrome pixmap, you send 72 bytes, when
> you send a 16 colour pixmap, you send 288 bytes (plus overheads).

Pixmaps can be (and usually are) cached in the X server.

The main concern here is rendering speed.  Fonts can be drawn *very*
quickly (on the order of 100K characters per second on some boxen) on
most newer hardware; pixmaps are almost always much slower.  This is
not really much of a concern, though, as it's not drawing very much.