On 2011-11-12 at 21:57, Alvin Penner wrote:
I believe this bug can be fixed by disabling the flag USE_PANGO_WIN32 in line 19 of src/libnrtype/FontFactory.h. When I do this on Windows XP, I gain about 35 new fonts. Not all of these new fonts are useable, but the most interesting ones, such as CommercialPi, Symbol, Technic, Webdings, Wingdings, MonoType Sorts, TechnicLite are working well, both in Inkscape and in IE9. This is a Windows-specific bug which hides symbol fonts, and does not occur in Gimp 2.6 on Win XP. As far as I can tell, the Gimp source code does not contain any analogue or equivalent of the flag USE_PANGO_WIN32. Would there be any objection if I disable this flag, or does it serve a specific purpose that is essential?
I put that in (several years ago) because of a large number of problems encountered trying to use fontconfig on win32. From memory, these included:
- Extremely slow application startup (with no visual feedback) on systems with a non-trivial number of fonts installed
- Lack of access to Type 1 fonts
- Poor integration with OS font management, meaning the fonts available to Inkscape were not necessarily the same as those available to other apps
If your testing leads you to believe that the above problems are now solved (or at least more bearable) then feel free to toggle the macro. When performance-testing it, make sure you have at least a few hundred ttfs on a non-SSD disk, and it would probably be advisable to wipe the fontconfig cache files before your testing in order to ensure we don't present an atrocious first-time user experience.
The correct solution is to migrate away from pango-fc/pango-win32 and towards pango-cairo.
Richard.