'Text and Font' slow on first open when docked in main window (trunk, 0.91.x)

[su_v]

1) Issue:
=========
Building the font list with all installed fonts for the first time in the current session is still taking too long.

2) Symptom:
===========
With many fonts installed, the 'Text and Font' dialog takes a long time to appear when opened for the first time in the current session) - but only if the dialog is docked in the main window (default setting). If the dialog is used in a detached state (floating dock), it opens quickly.

Steps to reproduce:
0) use a font configuration with lots of installed fonts
1) launch inkscape with default (new) prefs
2) open 'Text and Font' ('Shift+Ctrl+T')

Expected result:
The improved font loading and caching also affects the 'Text and Font' dialog and it opens quickly.

Actual result:
Opening the dialog takes (approximately) as long as the launch of Inkscape itself before the fixes for font loading & caching were committed.

3) detach the 'Text and Font' dialog from the main window
4) close the detached dialog ('Ctrl+W')
5) quit Inkscape and relaunch it
6) repeat step 2

Expected and actual result:
The improved font loading and caching also affects the 'Text and Font' dialog and in the detached state it opens quickly.

3) Notes:
=========
- Creating the full font list for the 'Text and Font' dialog appears to block the dialog's opening if docked in the main window.
- The detached dialog opens immediately, but lacks any progress indicator while the font list (top left) is getting populated with all entries (this seems to take about the same amount of time independent of the docked state of the dialog).
- When using the text tool first in the current session (open the font family dropdown list and wait until it has been fully populated with all installed fonts), subsequent opening of the 'Text and Font' dialog does not suffer that initial long delay (no matter whether it is docked or not).

4) System information:
======================
Reproduced with 0.91+devel r13790 and 0.91pre3 r13683 on OS X 10.7.5.

For the tests 2 font configurations had been used:
a) with ~500 fonts (system)
b) with ~2300 fonts (system+user)

The number of installed fonts was retrieved with fc-list (from fontconfig):
$ fc-list | wc -l

[ScislaC (scislac)]

Confirmed with 0.91.x r13678. Is this actually a wishlist item or should it have a proper importance assigned?

[su_v (suv-lp)]

On 2014-12-08 18:36 (+0100), ScislaC wrote:
> Is this actually a wishlist item or should it have a proper
> importance assigned?

Personally, I'm glad we have improved launch times now. A solution for remaining issues (or e.g. hiding them from the user by building the list in the background during low activity) would be a bonus point atm, hence wishlist. Please feel free to change it to a higher importance - I won't object ;-)

[Nathan Lee (nathan.lee)]

Thanks for the report! Closing as part of the migration of bugs to the new bugtracker on Gitlab.

The issue still exists in 1.x, and is tracked in https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1107 (I suppose it isn't a 1:1 parallel, but it describes the current behavior. As a note, I do replicate above behavior in 0.92.5 when docked)

Link redirect to our current bugtracker: http://inkscape.org/report