Re: System fonts

[Kazunobu Kuriyama]

Yen-Ju Chen wrote:

> The speed surely will slow down with font substitute,
> but there are some assumptions which can be made, such as the first
> 128 characters
> always exist for every font, or even the first 256 characters.
> The speed can be improved once the first implementation is done.
> And another GNUstep defaults can be used to turn on/off this feature
> for people who need it.
> For example, if NSPreferedFont = ("English Font", "Chinese Font") is
> set in GNUstep defaults,
> font substitute is turned on automatically.

You often raise an issue on performance of text rendering. So I'd like
to make
sure of this: how much is the performance actually degraded when Chinese
text is
rendered in comparison with pure ASCII one?

As described in your previous note, Chinese text need to handle 60,000
or more
characters; it's almost ten times as many as needed for modern Japanese
text.
So I understand the "slow down" issue only conceptually, but have no idea
how significant it is.

If the performance is not siginificantly degraded in ordinary
situations, that
would leads to much simper implementation and operations needed for font
handling.
Otherwise, as you suggested, we have to prepare some document on font
handling
more and more, making GNUstep less competitive in this particular field.

Regards,
- Kazunobu Kuriyama