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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: KFontCombo speed
From:       Lars Knoll <knoll () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-07-25 11:32:51
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On Wednesday 25 July 2001 12:04, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 July 2001 10:44, Lars Knoll wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > there is also another problem with this kind of font combobox. I have
> > some thai fonts here, that do _not_ have latin1 characters. The font
> > combobox just displays nothing there.
>
> Hmm... IIRC the Windows equivalent of this widget shows the font name in
> the default font if the font contains glyphs or otherwise nonprintable
> characters and _ after _ that adds a small sample of how the font really
> looks like by picking some characters that do exist in the font. Might be
> an idea here as well...

Still the performance problem remains. It just doesn't make sense if the app 
loads every font available. It can take ages over a slower network 
connection, or keep the XServer hanging for 20 seconds when you load a big 
unicode font. At the same time, it will take up rather significant amounts of 
ram in XServer and Client. A short calculation gives about 20k per 8bit font; 
up to 1.5M for a large Unicode font. About a third-half of this data is on 
the client and is often not shared between clients (depending on the XServer 
implementation). Now multiply that with the number of fonts I have on my 
machine: about 50-100. 

Summary: This font combo makes it very hard to use KDE on not so powerful 
devices without adding too much in terms of useablity.

All this is btw a rather small problem if you use Xft, but it is a huge one 
for old xlfd based fonts. So if you really want this feature enable it only 
when using Xft.

Lars

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