Launch of Inkscape delayed by building of font cache with fontconfig (with no visible indicator that Inkscape has started)

[David Bourguignon]

Dear all,

I recently installed Inkscape v0.91 x64 on a MS Windows 7 machine.

The install process ran smoothly. However, after starting the program, there was some process activity but no display at all. Nothing. I waited for several minutes before restarting the computer.

After going through the same steps, the same problem occurred. This is very strange, and I never encountered such software behavior before... Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards,

David.

[David Bourguignon (davidbourguignon)]

I just installed Inkscape v0.48.4-1 Win32 on the very same MS Windows 7 x64 machine where Inkscape v0.91 x64 is not launching (see my original post)... And it's working fine. Something was broken along the way to v0.91 IMHO. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

if the 64 bit version is causing a problem, you might want to try the latest 32 bit version of 0.91 as an alternative, it is available at:

https://inkscape.org/en/download/windows/

[David Bourguignon (davidbourguignon)]

Thanks Alvin for the feedback! Right now, I am happy with v0.48.4-1 but I will definitely give a try to v0.91 Win32 if I need to upgrade. Please let me know if you need any further details regarding my configuration, that could help spotting the bug.

My guess is that there are some graphics board driver incompatibilities behind this. Is Inkscape v0.91 relying on graphics hardware acceleration, and not v0.48?

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

>> Is Inkscape v0.91 relying on graphics hardware acceleration, and not v0.48?
not that I am aware of.
However there have been some differences noted between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Inkscape on Windows.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

The cause of this bug could be fontconfig building the font cache at initial startup.

With many fonts on a slow system I guess it actually could take some minutes to finish.
During that time the Inkscape process would only be active in background (visible in taskmanager), using up 100% CPU time of one core, with the GUI start being delayet until building the cache is complete.

If I remember correctly earlier versions of Inkscape used to generate the fontconfig cache only when actually importing PDFs, so initial startup was not delayed.

[Liam P. White (liampwhite)]

The delay is caused by fontconfig, that is correct.

It is also worthwhile noting that pango used the pango-win32 backend on Windows before, but now uses the fontconfig backend for some reason.

[David Bourguignon (davidbourguignon)]

Thanks a lot for your feedback! My two cents: a long startup time is not necessarily a problem if the user gets some info from the running program about what is going on...

Why not displaying a splash screen with a progress bar at launch, as does Gimp, which would provide to the user a better reason to wait? I hope it helps!

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Both, 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Inkscape should create the font cache only once on first start of Inkscape now (see bug 1196373 for details), so at least subsequent startups should always be fast.

Obviously visual feedback to the user on first launch is especially important, so we should still think about a solution...

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Good news everybody: There are some recent efforts to make the caching process faster, see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64766 (the changes are committed but still need to make it into a release)