[Silgraphite-devel] [Fwd: Re: [LTS] Graphite performance]

[Neil M. <nei...@si...>]

For those who aren't on LTS...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [LTS] Graphite performance
Date: 	Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:11:39 +0100
To: 	Linguistic & Translation Software - General 
<lin...@li...>


Ah, yes, the magic bullet that I was looking for:

 >> Please try setting the environment variable:
 >> SAL_DISABLE_GRAPHITE=1
 >>
 >> This should work on either Windows or Linux and see if it makes a
 >> noticeable difference.
...
 >
 > ... please could you try the environment variable option above? This
 > would allow a performance test with Charis but without Graphite, which
 > would be conclusive. We need to be sure that Uniscribe isn't able to
 > render Times a lot faster than Charis.

This does in fact turn off Graphite rendering, and now my test shows
that the performance of the Charis SIL font is (roughly) the same as
that of Times New Roman. Wonderful!

Since we are not using Graphite rendering at all in XXX, this
environment variable will be probably set as standard on all of our
computers.

Any chance that we could use our influence in the OOo community to make
this a check box somewhere in Tools, Options (maybe under
OpenOffice.org, Fonts?), rather than just an environment variable? My
concern is that we set this environment variable for someone here in
XXX, then they go somewhere else and want to see something rendered
with Graphite and can't for the life of them figure out why the text
won't render properly, when it renders fine on other computers. Finding
out that Graphite is disabled would be a whole lot easier on an options
page than it would be in an environment variable.

Just to be clear, I'm very happy that Graphite is in OOo 3.2, to help
those languages that don't have other options for rendering. But I'm
also now very happy that those folks who don't need Graphite rendering
still have a way to get good performance with Graphite-enabled fonts.