Xaw3dxft is alive and well

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libXaw3dXft is alive and well:
Version 1.6.4 was released 2 months ago. Version 1.6.3 was released 4 months ago. Unfortunately, the original author of libxaw3dxft, Jean-Pierre Demailly, passed away. He was a mathematician, notable enough to have his own Wikipedia page. The old website wasn't recoverable, so the new steward copied it to GitHub and there's an additional contributor who have worked on it. The old website hosted xpaint, which libxaw3dxft was a toolkit for. Xpaint was under GPL, while Xaw3dxft is under a permissive license. The last version of x11-toolkits/libxaw3dxft from Sourceforge was 1.6.2.h. These previous versions from Sourceforge came out soon after each version of libxaw3d. It mirrored libXaw3d, except it has additional Internationalization support through x11-fonts/libXft. It's the only Xaw implementation with Internationalization support, meaning for written fonts of world wide languages,. The old Sourceforge repository also had applications that ran on the library, and there were patches available there for them too.

LibXaw3d stewarded by Xorg is currently at version 1.6.6: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxaw3d/-/tree/libXaw3d-1.6.6. While Xaw still gets updates, it's versions are less modern.

An older thread FreeBSD thread on Xaw implementations, explanations, diagrams and screenshots: Thread athena-widgets-xaw-implementations.81588. Based on old screenshots, the graphical style of Xaw3dxft is identical to that Xaw3d, since the difference is the addition of Xft fonts. Actually, the version of Xaw on FreeBSD is over a decade behind the latest version of Xaw from Xorg.
xpaint-xaw3dxft.jpg

A screenshot of graphics/xpaint which uses x11-toolkits/libxaw3dxft version 1.6.2.h. This is expected to be identical to libXaw3d of the same version, which is at Xorg's website, as the difference is font support for other languages. To try another language, xpaint -lang jp for instance, would be run, but it has no effect as this program comes in English.

Xaw implementations rely on Xt and libx11. These are on the client end of X.

There has been a bit of Internet interest in Xaw implementations since 2022. Unfortunately, the restarted version of Xaw3dXft needs GNU auto tools, unlike the previous versions.

A brief history of Xaw3dxft/Xaw3d is at the new repository:
  • Xaw3d started in 1992
  • Xaw3dxft started in 2009
  • Xorg took stewardship of Xaw3d in 2012
  • Latest xaw3dxft version from previous Sourceforge repository released in 2020
  • Flater maintains xaw3dxft, starting in 2025, where release activity has restarted
NeXtaw is old with its last updates from 2003: it's based off of libxaw for a NeXt appearance.

If I could, I would make libxaw3d the standard, with xft support optional, which would translate into libxaw3dxft. Then, nextaw and xaw in appearance only, would be flavors of libxaw3d. Nextaw is from 2003. Other unmaintained xaw implementations would only become flavors or styles.
 
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