Re: why is the font cache so greedy?

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

On 23-Feb-2002 Adam Fedor wrote:
> Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> 
>> 
>> My question is, why can't the font cache be demand inserted?  Why load up
>> all
>> of the fonts when only a tiny handful are likely to be used?  if this can
>> not
> 
> 
> That would probably work in most cases, except when you wanted an 
> NSFontPanel. Then we'd have to look through all the fonts anyway to see 
> which ones the system had.
> 
> We could probably play some games to get around X server limitations. 
> Perhaps only search for fonts in the current encoding (assuming we 
> wouldn't change it on the fly, which would be nice to support).
> 
> We could even hack through the font path using XSetFontPath/XGetFontPath 
> so we would only search one part of the path at a time.
> 

if you could get the font list without loading the entire font list at once
that would help.  I am not sure what the font cache code does, but it
apparently overloads the X server.  Other GUI toolkits support font choosers
without killing X.