It's not defensive, it's just honest. I'm not a fontconfig dev or fanboy. And I'm not saying that the library is perfect and needs no improvements either. I just don't see it as a situation that will change anytime soon, unless someone is willing and motivated to put in a lot of work for what certainly seems like an edge case. As I said originally, I was genuinely curious about the use case, even apologized for not addressing your questions. Unfortunately your responses don't seem to touch on that at all. In any case, have a good day. <div class="gmail_extra"> <div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 24, 2016 4:54 AM, "L. A. Walsh" <<a href="mailto:fonts@tlinx.org">fonts@tlinx.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Jerry Casiano wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On Wed, 2016-11-23 at 21:46 -0800, L. A. Walsh wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Most any X program that has the font name encoded in a config file for one, </blockquote> If you're specifying a font name, then the filepath doesn't matter. </blockquote> --- That's true, but its hard to find a utility to rename the font-filenames according to their internal name. I did run across one but it only worked for ascii or maybe western character-set based names. Really mangled fonts from other languages. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> and second, most windows programs that rely on the user to pick a font </blockquote> Selecting a font from a list of thousands of families with some containing 20-30 variations sounds fun. </blockquote> ---- Actually you usually just have to pick the family name and have style sheets select variations based on the usage. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Also, the actual filepath wouldn't or at least shouldn't matter there either. </blockquote> --- Didn't say it would. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Workarounds include technology *growing* to handle larger </blockquote> collections and workloads. </blockquote> Sounds like that's the only solution that would satisfy you, so no point in even trying to suggest changes that might ease the pain till that happens. </blockquote> ---- Uh.... I mentioned the problem over 2 years ago on this list. I've ignore the problem and tried to make due by not touching the fonts on linux for the most part. But after a couple of years, it seems like no progress is being made. I threw out several questions that I don't know the answers to -- and you seem to be getting defensive from the first response, in asking me "why do you have all those fonts" -- rather than giving any answers to the questions -- like whether or not the 32-bit data is needed on a 64-bit only system, or caching by inode and storing names. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I mean, if you just have to have 15,000 duplicates and 20,000+ font files active at all times then it is what it is. </blockquote> ==== I didn't create the duplicates. In fact I *used* to try to delete them, but various programs and sources tended to duplicate them. Linux was especially bad in creating symlinks for every font that had spaces in it -- those were read by other programs that got confused about which was the real name. Eventually I stopped trying. If you want to tell me font-config can rename all of them to eliminate the dups, that's great. Also trying to rename fonts on windows can also be problematic -- as some of them are considered "system files" -- remove them (or rename them) and your system won't boot. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> If windows could handle 25K fonts 7 years ago (as some smaller number of grouped font families), I don't see why solutions today can't be faster and more capable. </blockquote> That's interesting... Good for them. That OS would normally slow to a crawl with even a fraction of that figure. </blockquote> --- That happened in XP somewhat, and win98 had horrible limitations, but in win7 -- no slowdown except at times when you go to display the whole list -- can take maybe 30 seconds -- that's tolerable. 12 minutes -- not so much. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> That's actually the main reason font management tools came to be, in order to avoid the poor performance and usability caused by having large amounts of fonts active. </blockquote> ---- Yes, such tools used to be necessary, but I don't see as many these days and none that work with the OS. With 64-bit memory, throwing a Gig or so at a font DB in memory would be nothing on many machines. I throw 4-8G at various server programs to allow them to be fast, but you can't do that as easily with 32-bit constraints. Many distros aren't shipping 32-bit binaries any more. So my asking if the 32-bit font-caches even needed to be built on machines not using 32-bit progs for graphics (or anything else). Seems like a reasonable question, but instead of any of my questions being answered I get asked why I should be allowed or supported in having so many... If it took 30 seconds to cook the fonts or if it happened in background -- wouldn't be as much of an issue, but instead of improvement, I am feeling a defensive posture about even asking questions about what parts are needed and whether some things are necessary, or whether or not things could be made parallel. Those are reasonable questions. So why am I getting what seems to be defensiveness? </blockquote></div></div>