X and DPS

Juliusz Chroboczek

27 February 2001, updated 30 October 2006


Table of Contents

Notice of Obsolescence and Removal from X.Org Releases

Updated by Jim Gettys and Juliusz Chroboczek.

Notice of Obsolescence and Removal from X.Org Releases

DPS is now obsolete.

At the time when I started this project, there was no decent rendering interface for X11 other than DPS.

Since then, there has been a large amount of work on a simple and clean X server extension, Xrender, which provides the basis for just such an interface.

Rendering libraries that are being built above Xrender include Xft, a font rendering library built on FreeType; Cairo, a geometry rendering library that provides PostScript-like rendering primitives but with from-the-ground support for Porter-Duff compositing (transparency); Pango, a high-level typesetting library.

If your application uses DPS, please consider porting it to the above libraries. See the DPS extension site for more details

The client-side DPS software was included and built by default (except as noted below) in the X.Org X11R6.8 release series. The client-side software was included, but not built unless specifically configured by the builder, in the X.Org X11R6.9 release series. The client-side DPS software is no longer included in X11R7.0 or later releases.

The server-side software is not included in any X.Org release for licensing reasons; the code is still available from the DPS extension site; it is not known whether it still compiles.