I've just found that embedded fonts unpack incredibly slowly in snow leopard.

I have an example with about 60 embedded fonts. I watched them unpack
in fseventer and it starts out about 5 a second but gradually slows to
1 every 6 seconds or so.

I don't know where to begin to look for a fix from this other than
tell the client not to embed more than 10 fonts.

I also see a temp file "com.apple.FontRegistry:font-journal" being
updated with each font.

Dir10.1

---

> I don't know where to begin to look for a fix from this other than
> tell the client not to embed more than 10 fonts.

this might be the best idea. personally 've never used more than a
couple of embedded fonts at a time. and when I manually install a font
in windows (e.g. by dropping it to the windows\fonts folder), it also
tales a couple of seconds, so maybe installing a new font is necessarily
complex enough to take a couple of seconds and you can't do anything
about it.

but are all 60 fonts required for every session, or do the actually
required fonts depend on the user's choices? if the latter, instead of
installing all fonts at the beginning, maybe you could install only the
required on the fly the first time they are really needed (by
loading/linking external castLibs)

cheers,
valentin

---

I just did some rough tests with the same castlib and fonts-

OS launch times
PPC 10.4 5 seconds
Intel 10.5 30 seconds
Intel 10.6 5 minutes!

It used to be fast. It's just Rosetta that is slowing it down I guess.
I wonder if some system process is eating up CPU.

I hope I don't have to write something to load fonts dynamically.
That would be a lot of coding in this case, and cause pauses at inconvenient
times.

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 4:26 PM, Valentin Schmidt <vsl (AT) dasdeck (DOT) com> wrote:
>> I don't know where to begin to look for a fix from this other than
>> tell the client not to embed more than 10 fonts.
>
> this might be the best idea. personally 've never used more than a
> couple of embedded fonts at a time. and when I manually install a font
> in windows (e.g. by dropping it to the windows\fonts folder), it also
> tales a couple of seconds, so maybe installing a new font is necessarily
> complex enough to take a couple of seconds and you can't do anything
> about it.
>
> but are all 60 fonts required for every session, or do the actually
> required fonts depend on the user's choices? if the latter, instead of
> installing all fonts at the beginning, maybe you could install only the
> required on the fly the first time they are really needed (by
> loading/linking external castLibs)
>
> cheers,
> valentin
>
> ---
>

> I hope I don't have to write something to load fonts dynamically.
> That would be a lot of coding in this case, and cause pauses at inconvenient
> times.

of course I didn't mean to suggest to load them at arbitrary places, but
e.g. when a certain "chapter" or whatever is loaded/changed. it's hard
for me to imagine what kind of app might require 60 different fonts,
this must either look like a total mess :-), or it's some multilang app
with non-western languages that require different encodings/fonts, in
the latter case you could e.g. load the specific fonts only when the
user changes the language.
I often had problems before with embedded fonts in windows, even with
apps that only contained 3 or 4 fonts, especially after restarting the
app serveral times in the same windows session, sometimes installing the
fonts seems to get blocked by remaining temporary files and then the
text is not displayed correctly. therefor I always try to use embedded
fonts as economical as possible, I would never dare to embed 60 of them
in a single movie (at least not for windows projectors, I can't speak
for mac here).

cheers,
valentin

---

My app is a PowerPoint replacement. Client admins embed as many fonts as
they want.
The projector has a pane for embedding the fonts and that castlib is then
distributed to the users.

In this case it's just variations on about 10 different fonts- light,
italic, bold etc.

To load the fonts dynamically I'd have to check each presentation and export
the fonts before they show it.
That's not hard but it involves a lot more time than I have.

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 6:23 PM, Valentin Schmidt <vsl (AT) dasdeck (DOT) com> wrote:

> > I hope I don't have to write something to load fonts dynamically.
> > That would be a lot of coding in this case, and cause pauses at
> inconvenient
> > times.
>
> of course I didn't mean to suggest to load them at arbitrary places, but
> e.g. when a certain "chapter" or whatever is loaded/changed. it's hard
> for me to imagine what kind of app might require 60 different fonts,
> this must either look like a total mess :-), or it's some multilang app
> with non-western languages that require different encodings/fonts, in
> the latter case you could e.g. load the specific fonts only when the
> user changes the language.
> I often had problems before with embedded fonts in windows, even with
> apps that only contained 3 or 4 fonts, especially after restarting the
> app serveral times in the same windows session, sometimes installing the
> fonts seems to get blocked by remaining temporary files and then the
> text is not displayed correctly. therefor I always try to use embedded
> fonts as economical as possible, I would never dare to embed 60 of them
> in a single movie (at least not for windows projectors, I can't speak
> for mac here).
>
> cheers,
> valentin
>
> ---
>