New Features

The following new features are provided in this release of the Solaris X server.

Shared Memory Transport Extension

The Solaris X server now includes the Sun extension SUN_SME, Sun's implementation of a shared memory transport mechanism. This extension provides the capability of sending client requests to the server via shared memory.

MT-Safe DGA

The Direct Graphics Access extension to the Solaris server is now MT-safe. This means that the extension can take advantage of multi-threaded processing.

DPS Toolkit for Motif

The Display PostScript Toolkit for Motif is available in Solaris at this release. The DPS Motif Toolkit is a set of Motif widgets that assist in common programming tasks. These tasks include font selection, color selection, and scrolling and zooming within a DPS application. For information on this toolkit, refer to Programming the Display PostScript System with X from Adobe Systems Incorporated.

NumLock Key Support

In this release, the OpenWindows version of Xlib supports NumLock Key processing through calls to XLookupString. For information, see Chapter 1, "Introduction to the Solaris X Server".

DPS Compositing Operators

The OpenStep^(TM) compositing extension to the Display PostScript system has been added to the Solaris server at this release. Compositing enables separately rendered images to be combined into a final image. For information on this feature, see Chapter 2, "DPS Features and Enhancements".

New Features in the DPS Extension

The following new features are provided in the DPS extension to the X11 server at this release:

CID fonts - Native support for Adobe's CID font format has been provided. The CID font format was designed for large character set fonts. Using CID fonts allows for improved performance over Adobe's Type 0 (composite) counterparts. See Adobe Technical Note #5092 (CID-Keyed Font File Format Overview) for more information.
XATM 3.0 - XATM is the interface that allows X11 clients to access fonts such as Type 1 fonts, which are rendered by the Display PostScript extension. The new XATM calls into the PostScript interpreter directly to do its font rasterization. This means that X11 clients can now use any font that XDPS can handle, including Type 3 fonts, Type 0 (composite) fonts, and CID fonts. Previous releases of XATM only allowed X11 clients to use Type 1 fonts.