GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 795074
Slow Loading Fonts
Last modified: 2018-04-17 14:50:33 UTC
As noted by other users, GIMP can be very slow loading fonts. There was a previous version that didn't have this flaw. Can it be fixed via some setting? Fonts are not a feature I often need so the five-second wait to load them in the middle of editing a screenie is really annoying!
It would be much more than five seconds when this slow loading issue kicks in, so what you are experiencing is not what others are reporting. Script-Fu's script loading is the longest part or GIMP startup if everything else is right.
Post in haste, repent at leisure. This time I actually measured the loading time and it was about 25 seconds! This is on a system that runs all the latest games and exceeds recommended specs for most of them. Most of that long time was spent on fonts. WTF?
On a less-than current Windows 7 system, I do not even see the fonts step in the splash dialog. The 25 seconds could be due to your GIMP rebuilding the font cache every time you run it, and this would be an exceptionally fast speed then. Can you check if you got a corrupt font cache and if renaming and deleting it makes GIMP start up faster after one initial rebuild? See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=782676#c14 for the location of the cache directory.
I found a folder named fontconfig in C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\Share\xml\ -- in that folder is a file named fonts.dtd dated 5/9/17 and containing 8 Kb of something. I renamed it to fonts.old and started the program three times: 1. 25" 2. 18" REBOOT 3. 25" There's no new file in the folder fontconfig. BTW my C: drive is a Crucial MX 200 250GB SSD married to an Intel Core i7-4790K CPU and an updated version of Win 7 Pro SP1, a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 GPU, and 8 Gb of RAM.
The directory you found is not %LOCALAPPDATA%\fontconfig You can enter the directory name as shown into Windows Explorer, it will expand the environment variable and get you to the proper location.
Ahh... Found and renamed that elusive folder to fontconfig.old. First start = 27" Restart = 3" :-) I wonder if there's a way to enable GIMP to detect and auto-correct that particular issue? Thanks for your help!
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 782676 ***