[X4U] OSX and fonts

[Stroller]

On Nov 3, 2005, at 4:24 pm, Kansas Territory wrote:
>
> Does MACOSX suffer from having TOO MANY fonts open at one time.
> I've got a few 100 maybe a couple thousand fonts.   155MB worth anyway.
>
> You suppose a Dual 1.25 G4 with 768mb ram would suffer from just 
> opening up all these fonts and leaving them active.
> I know I could enable some, disable others and go back and forth with 
> that.. but I did enough of that back in the 90's  when I was in 
> printing.
> And I don't want to "go back there"  is you know what I mean.

I believe that an excessive number of fonts can indeed cause slowdowns, 
but not for all applications. When a program has to access the complete 
list of fonts then surely having fewer fonts will make that operation 
faster. You say this was the case (under OS 8 or 9??) in the 1990s, and 
I remember reading a few years back that it was the case on Windows - I 
am unable to think of a reason (justified by computer science) as to 
why it should not be the case on any newer operating system (although 
faster processors & optimisations might allow the per-font speed to be 
faster, of course).

I upgraded Adobe Creative Suite on this machine (DP G5) to CS2 last 
week, and now when I select a font in InDesign it displays the name of 
the font in that font (as opposed to a Helvitica list of font names). I 
noticed this because the first time I did so, activating the drop-down 
to select a font was noticeably slower than normal.

Stroller.