Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to do any serious testing of performance issues because I only have about 100 fonts on my Windows XP machine and Inkscape starts up in about 3 seconds or so. However, here is a list of what I have seen so far. (I know nothing about fonts, so you may have to excuse my terminology.)
- the original Inkscape, with flag USE_PANGO_WIN32 enabled, reports 64 font families which are all of type .otf or .ttf - the modified Inkscape, with flag USE_PANGO_WIN32 disabled, reports 100 font families, of which some are of type .fon - in the switchover, 2 font families were lost, and 38 new families were gained. - the startup time for Inkscape is the same in both cases, 3 seconds - the new list of font families appears to be identical to the list presented by Gimp 2.6 - of the 38 new families, 16 of them fail silently when used in Inkscape, and they revert back to the default Sans (the 16 failures include all the .fon fonts and also some fonts that are not recognized by the font viewer 'dp4 Font Viewer 2.0') - the new fonts that fail in Inkscape, also appear to fail in Gimp as well, as far as I can tell. (in Inkscape I was able to detect the failure explicitly by monitoring the call to InstallFace in FontFactory.cpp) - the remaining 22 new fonts work properly in both Inkscape and Gimp - the list of 22 new fonts that work includes all the fonts that have been previously mentioned by name in Bug 165665 and Bug 887327
- could someone running Windows comment on whether they have any concerns about this change? If not, then I will probably wait a few days and make the change, which consists of about two keystrokes.
Alvin