[XeTeX] long search time when font doesn't exist
Will Robertson
wspr81 at gmail.com
Wed Apr 23 16:19:27 CEST 2008
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:27 PM, Ulrike Fischer <news2 at nililand.de> wrote:
> if I try to use a font that doesn't exist (e.g. because I mistype the
> name) then xelatex stops for about a minute while the hard drive is
> quite busy. Then I get the expected "tfm missing" error.
This happens on other platforms too. As I understand, XeTeX has a
cache of fontnames that it uses to speed up font access, but the first
time a font is used, it will be quite slow; when a font cannot be
found, it goes to some effort to locate a copy on disk, but is
obviously unsuccessful.
I could possibly see the utility of a flag to turn this off, but it
doesn't generally bother me too much :)
Incidentally, this slowdown is the primary reason that an
\IfFontExists macro isn't really feasible.
Will
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