[ft-devel] Free-Type and Windows 7 beta data

[Wendy Bertoglio (Comsys Information Technology)]

Hello,

 

My name is Wendy Bertoglio and I am a Program Manager with the Windows Application Experience team at Microsoft.  One of our commitments is to provide the best possible end user experience for each new version of the Microsoft Windows operating system.  Our Windows 7 Beta is live and as our main goal is to provide a positive user experience we gather crash data, hangs, & bluescreens via Windows Error Reporting (WER). WER provides us with an accurate portrayal of how an application or driver is performing in the wild and in doing so we are able to identify and often address reliability issues.

 

I’m contacting you because we’ve identified reliability issues with freetype6.dll. Unfortunately due to limited information we receive when a crash occurs, we can’t reproduce the issue exactly as the user encountered, but it is ranked #318 in crashed worldwide. I know that FreeType is an open source product, so we can’t sign a terms of use with you to view your crash data on our portal site, however, we had a developer look at it recently and they’ve identified the cause of the hang and provided a suggestion to fix the issue:

 

The issue here is that freetype6 is enumerating all the fonts in the Fonts directory, and it made it only as far as the H's before the user got impatient and killed the application.

 

There are 306 fonts from C:/Windows/fonts/ega80869.fon to C:/Windows/fonts/timesbi.ttf. (That's the section captured in the dump of cabinet 0610042945).

 

A typical machine with Office installed has 160 fonts in that range, so this machine has 80% more fonts than typical.

 

Actually the enumeration seems to be coming from libfontconfig_1.

In cabinet 0611836912, there are 204 fonts from "C:/Windows/fonts/msuighur.ttf" to "C:/Windows/fonts/vga852.fon", as opposed to 143 on a "normal" system.

 

So these machines do not have an excessively large number of fonts (less than 2x normal) but it still takes a long time to churn through them.

 

Recommend putting up a progress dialog with a Cancel button or otherwise providing feedback to the user that progress is being made with respect to loading all the fonts (and giving them a way to cancel).

 

Is this the right avenue to take this issue? Please let me know if we can be of assistance to you or if there is a server version that users of FreeType6 can download so as not to encounter this issue.

 

Thank you,

Wendy Bertoglio

address@hidden

206-353-2606