Re: Observations on the 4.6rc1 windows package

[Bastian M. <bma...@we...>]

Am 17.02.2012 18:46, schrieb Ethan A Merritt:
> On Friday, February 17, 2012 09:35:20 am Juhász Péter wrote:
>>
>> - On one of my machines, startup appeared to be extremely slow, taking
>> about 5 minutes (!). This is true for both the console and GUI versions.
>> For the first few tries I've actually killed the process, because I
>> didn't have the patience to wait it out. Once it started, it appeared to
>> work normally, there were no delays and plotting was instantaneous as
>> well. (Older versions had a long delay at the first plot because of
>> fontconfig or whatever.)
>> This happened in both interactive and non-interactive mode, however,
>> only on a virtual machine running Vista. On a real computer running
>> Windows 7, startup was instantaneous.
>
> I seem to recall this was discussed a couple of years ago.
> The issue then was that if the program did not find a certain set of fonts,
> it triggered creation of a bitmap font set from the underlying font
> descriptions.  This was painfully slow but only  happened the first time,
> since subsequent runs would find the  now-created font set.
> However, I wonder if you run under a virtual machine whether every time
> is a "first" time?  Anyhow, my best guess is that this is a font issue
> rather than anything to do with gnuplot per se.
>
> 	Ethan
>

The cairo terminals no longer use the fontconfig mechanism of Windows, 
so this particular issue should have been solved.
On the other hand I vaguely remember a similar report a while ago, but I 
couldn't reproduce on various XP, Vista and 7 machines.

   Bastian

>> I have no idea what causes this, and why it appears on one machine but
>> doesn't on the other. Have any of you experienced anything similar?
>> I think this issue is potentially serious, because those who meet with
>> it unsuspectingly may end up thinking that gnuplot is completely useless
>> - "I've clicked on the icon", they would say, "but nothing happened!"
>>
>> - The reworked windows terminal is awesome! To everyone who contributed
>> to it: good work! I miss the "previous zoom" button from the wxt
>> terminal, though.
>>
>> Péter Juhász
>>