[XeTeX] pre-loading fonts in the format?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 25 Oct 2008, at 9:00 PM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

> Peter Dyballa a écrit :
>> Am 25.10.2008 um 21:25 schrieb Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard:
>>
>>> is it possible to preload a set of fonts in a format file, so that
>>> they
>>> are loaded faster in the document?
>>
>> Not in XeTeX
>
> That's what I just experimented:
>
> ! Can't \dump a format with native fonts or font-mappings.

Right; this would present various technical challenges, and could be  
quite confusing for the user if the .fmt file contained references to  
fonts that meanwhile have been removed or modified in the host system.

> Too bad. For some reason fonts such as Minion Pro takes as much as 6  
> or
> 7 seconds to load on my computer.

That seems very slow. What system are you running, and how are you  
specifying the font name? Normally, it should be reasonably quick  
unless you have just modified your font collection (in which case  
caches may need to be regenerated), or if you use a form of the font  
name that is not found directly via fontconfig, in which case xetex  
will fall back to a slower and more exhaustive search.

JK