Finally, I remarked that inkscape interface is very slow in OS X compared to other equally memory hungry X11 applications (like the gimp). My guess is that it's because Inkscape icons are parsed from an svg file whereas gimp icons are from png files. does anybody thinks this can be the case?
Not likely, because the icons are rendered once on start and then cached. So unless the caching is broken on OSX, this is not a likely reason.
What exactly you mean by "interface is slow"? What operations are slow?
when starting the interface is slow to be rendered (so I imagine that this is the caching part). then when opening a menu, it takes some time to display. I guess it is the time to cache the image also because afterwards, the menus displays quickly. but the caching seems to be limited in time as, after a while, the same menus becomes slow again.
That's probably not cache, since the code just shoves stuff on in and never ages things out.
Instead it could be other things building up, especially memory use.
overall editing big documents with inkscape, especially documents with bitmaps included, is quite slow: moving inside the document is slow, moving object also and the display is not refreshed very often. but this is probably more an x11 issue that an inkscape issue and this was not really what I was talking about. (in addition this my be related to the fact that I am working with a graphic tablet, which is usually faster than a mouse, and with two screens so X11 has a lot to display. could it be?)
Very much could be.
A quick idea of your processor and memory might help.
Thank you for the answer. I use an iBook G4 1GHz with 768 MB of memory. In addition, some more tests showed me that inkscape X11- forwarded from a server (bi-Xeon 2.8 GHz) to my iBook is faster that inkscape on the iBook (though just a little faster). so it might well be a problem with my hardware beeing too weak. but still, that's not the smallest computer ever...
thank you anyway.
JiHO --- Windows, c'est un peu comme le beaujolais nouveau : a chaque nouvelle cuvee on sait que ce sera degueulasse, mais on en prend quand meme par masochisme. --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/