GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 546344
Font Preferences needs to give user power over system fonts path
Last modified: 2008-10-30 20:15:09 UTC
Font preferences allows the user to add custom paths to font directories. The system fonts are included by default but are not viewable/removable by going to File > Preferences > Folders > Fonts Even though the fonts found in /usr/share/fonts are included in Gimp's font selections, they cannot be seen in the font preferences (list of paths). As a feature request it has been suggested that giving user control over the fonts to be used may allow gimp to react less sluggish by having an option to not trying to load all the system fonts. The way it is done now (loading all system fonts at startup) should still remain the default. A few suggestions on how Gimp could implement giving the end-user more power over system fonts.: 1) Have a check box in Font preferences: "Use System Fonts" 2) Place /usr/share/fonts (and perhaps all its subdirectories) in the list of paths
Hmm, so what is the problem that you are trying to solve here? GIMP feeling sluggish because it loads the system fonts? Is that it?
(In reply to comment #1) > Hmm, so what is the problem that you are trying to solve here? GIMP feeling > sluggish because it loads the system fonts? Is that it? > Currently, the end-user does not have full control over system fonts in Gimp. The proposed feature request will give control over system fonts from withing Gimp, so that the user could chose to turn them off if preferred. In turn this will allow "power users" to have full control over the fonts displayed in Gimp. To answer your question, this can in fact take away the sluggish feeling of choosing fonts when comparing starting GIMP with 200 system fonts vs. starting GIMP with 5 well chosen fonts.
GIMP, or rather fontconfig, uses a cache. So it should not make a noticeable difference if you start GIMP with 5 or 200 or 1000 fonts. I don't see the benefit of disabling system fonts in GIMP. So far I haven't looked at the fontconfig API. It's quite likely that this is not even possible to implement. But as long as I don't see the benefit, there's no point in researching this and keeping a bug report for it. If you want to reach a larger audience to discuss your idea, then please post on the gimp-developer mailing-list. In general all changes should be discussed there before an enhancement request is opened.
Sven, I may have presented my feature request incorrectly. Please do not treat this as a bug that you can send to /dev/null as it is definately not a bug. I am not attempting to make GIMP run faster, but simply have control over what fonts are available. This is not possible with system fonts. With most Linux based systems out there you will find that there are a lot of system fonts preinstalled which cannot be removed since many applications are dependent on them. From a designer's point of view, the system fonts are not particularly nice or useful for most projects. If a project require only 5 designer fonts, there is no use in presenting 200 fonts to the user and having to run through them to find the 5 needed fonts. Please understand that this has nothing to do with making Gimp faster, and everything with making it more usable. I have followed you advice and started a thread concerning this feature request. Please reconsider checking if this would be possible and if so, placing this under a developer wish list.