[Scribus] font management?

[Craig Ringer]

On Sun, 2005-04-17 at 11:46 -0400, Louis Desjardins wrote:

> That's very interesting. In the Mac world, this isn't the case. Fonts 
> do make things slower, even on big hardware... hmmmm not G5s (didn't 
> test) but dual 1,25 GHz G4s with 1 GB RAM.

Wow. I'm genuinely surprised they didn't do something about that, since
it's been a rather painful problem with MacOS since the MacOS 7 days at
least.

There is, after all, little reason to load all fonts on a modern
machine, and even if you do the worst it should do is eat some memory.

> This is why we rely on 
> utility programs such as Suitcase.

Suitcase and I don't get on well... I seem to have a lot fewer problems
with ATM Deluxe myself.

> By my own little experience with 
> Macs, I assumed the same would occur in the Linux world. I see it's 
> totally different.

Yep. Each app on Linux/UNIX is far more responsible for its own font
handling, though the vast majority use the freetype and fontconfig
libraries to do it. This is rather different to MacOS, where my
understanding is that it's the system that does the font loading etc.

I'd personally expect the MacOS way to be considerably more efficient,
especially for commonly used fonts (since all apps can share one loaded
copy), but there could be a lot going on that I don't understand.

> Very interesting. In that case, it would only be 
> more convenient for Scribus users to be offered a way of gathering 
> the fonts used in a particular project if you don't want an endless 
> menu ... nothing to do with performance as such.

That's essentially my view (though startup time may become an issue I
guess ... hopefully some caching can make that go away). Some of the
improvements to font selection Craig Bradney has been talking about
would help a lot too, esp if combined with font selection that listed
each family only once then listed individual faces in a submenu /
dependent combobox.

>  I just can't imagine 
>  2000 fonts opened on a Mac... Coffee, someone? :)

Well, if you mean that it would crash before you got back from the
coffee break you took while waiting for it to load the fonts, I could
agree with you :-P

--
Craig Ringer