On Sat, 13 Aug 2005, MenTaLguY wrote:
On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 18:08 +1000, Michael Wybrow wrote:
So, I've done the following (commited to CVS). On Tiger, when Inkscape is launched, after checking X11 is available, a dialog is brought up informing users of the fontconfig problem. The dialog has a button labelled "run fc-cache". If chosen, an OS X authentication dialog in launched and fc-cache is run following the authentication. A file is stored in ~/.inkscape to mark that fc-cache has been run. Thus, once you you've gone though the process it won't try this again.
Ok, good. This is exactly what I've been waiting for.
However, could you please make one small change before I merge to 0.42.1?
Instead of checking for ~/.inkscape/.fccache, check for /etc/fonts/fonts.conf directly.
There's no reason to bug them if it already exists, is there?
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good way to check if the font caches need to be regenerated. Or at least I can't code a check for this since I can't recreate the problem on any of the Tiger machines I have access to. The problem is not /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, that should always exist and is not created by fc-cache command. fc-cache creates .fonts.cache-1 files in users home directories if run by a user, or font.cache-1 files in the system font directories if run by root. These files contain some information about fonts available fontconfig to speed up application launching. Incidently, the automatic generation of these files was the reason we were seeing very slow start times for some users on Tiger.
Some users that have reported this error even had the cache files present in the system fonts directories but they just didn't seem to be up to date or valid. Thus, until I find a machine on which I can detect the actual problem the next best thing is to just show this warning to everyone the first time Inkscape is run on Tiger.
Cheers, Michael