Starting very slow (scanning fonts)

[Vincent van Beveren]

I'm using Inkscape 9.1, x64 version on Windows 7.

When starting Inkscape no window is shown. It hangs on having 4 to 5 threads. Using ProcessMonitor I can see it attempting to read font files. And it does progress, but very very slowly. Just one font every 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

I'm not running from a network drive.

I only occasionally use Inkscape, and this install worked fine in the past, about a month ago. I don't know what caused the change. Reinstalling Inkscape makes no difference, neither does rebooting the computer. It works fine on other PCs with Windows 7 x64.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Have an version of Windows 7 x64
2) Start Inkscape

[Liam P. White (liampwhite)]

The issue reported here is a manifestation of buggy behavior in fontconfig that results in horrible first-run experience on both Mac OS X and Windows.

[Vincent van Beveren (vvanbeveren)]

Yes, this is correct. I have let it run, and after about 1.5 - 2 hours the Inkscape window appeared. After closing Inkscape and opening it a second time it was almost instantaneous.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Will be fixed in 0.92, see bug #1196373 (which is basically a duplicate of this bug).

For the remaining issue that at some point the font cache has to be generated and Inkscape seems not to be starting as a result see bug #1528629.