While trying to move a project to the pango stack I noticed the native font selection backends were bad/useless on some platforms (like windows see [1]). So I opted to try and use fontconfig on all platforms as it performs outstandingly and has wonderful defaults for all platforms. However during this transition I noticed that there are some major issues with cache build speed and during investigation I see that there has recently been effort to improve the situation[2]. From what I can tell the fontconfig team has maintained that these cache issues were irrelevent for the primary fontconfig platform (linux) [3]. On linux of course the cache is global and maintained usually by font packages ensuring its up-to-date. However it was precisely this the slow cache build times that lead to package managers being required to build in additional tooling to support not rebuilding cache for every font installed [4]. Anyway I hope that is enough reason to persuade you that there are substantial improvements to make to the caching strategy and they are beneficial not only for the odd platforms (osx, windows) but also for Linux. My question is if fontconfig would be receptive to building/accepting a patch modifying the caching strategy to include checkums per file instead of/in addition to per directory. Currently any change to directory (such as adding a new font) invalidates all fonts within that directory. This means for directories like the system directory it results in re scans of hundreds or more fonts. Thankfully this is faster on platforms like linux where all fonts on freetype. However this improvement in scanning did not carry over to windows with its many FNT (150 on the average install) and even on my very robust development machine building a cache for a mere 650 files takes half a minute. This might be acceptable on install of the application where we can take our time building the cache, but what happens when a user installs 1 more font? A change to cache individual file checksums would provide fontconfig a way to only require the expensive coverage check of a single font instead of the entirety of a users. I dare say with this exact change the need to use a faster less robust coverage check that made scanning freetype fonts faster may be unneeded as the number of scans required to rebuild a cache would reduced 100x on the average system or more. I'm certain such a change would be highly appreciated by all fontconfig consumers who are hoping to use its powerful feature set in a multiplatform context. --Kurt Kartaltepe [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162681 [2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2017-August/005986.html [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64766 [4] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2007-October/002728.html _______________________________________________ Fontconfig mailing list Fontconfig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/fontconfig
