Re: Observations on the 4.6rc1 windows package

[Juhász P. <pet...@gm...>]

On Mon, 2012-02-27 at 20:53 +0100, Bastian Märkisch wrote:
> 
> Am 27.02.2012 20:35, schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
> > On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 12:22, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> >>
> >> Mojca Miklavec reported earlier that wxWidgets 2.9 has problems on OSX.
> >
> > However it works now - after some patches have been applied to gnuplot
> > (or maybe I should double check that the patches are indeed in sources
> > and not just on my computer).
> >
> >
> > Before claiming differences in startup speed, please double check
> > something that definitely has a huge influence. I think that wxWidgets
> > use fc-config and when one first starts the program, it will always
> > take a considerable amount of time to build font caches (it has to
> > scan all fonts in C:\Windows\Fonts and possibly some others). So it
> > might be that whenever one tested the new build with wxt 2.9, it was
> > only rebuilding caches and the second run would be faster, while the
> > caches for gnuplot with wxt 2.8 were already present and thus gnuplot
> > start was faster. This problem should not occur on linux and mac and
> > you cannot get rid of it on windows unless you rewrite some code from
> > wxt or configure fontconfig in a different way (but then users might
> > just as well start complaining that the new fonts don't work in
> > gnuplot).
> >
> > Mojca
> 
> Tests have been run several times of course. Please note that the 
> cairo/pango terminals (including wxt) no longer use the fontconfig 
> mechanism.
> 
>    Bastian
> 

I remember that there used to be delays related to font caching but this
issue seems to be something else. For one, that delay used to manifest
itself the first time I used the wxt terminal, and only then. This delay
shows up every time I start the program, even in non-interactive mode.
And as Bastian says, the fontconfig mechanism is not used anymore.

Péter Juhász