Re: unicode font slowness (Re: gettext patch (beta))

[Colin D Bennett <colin@gibibit.com>]

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On Sat, 7 Feb 2009 22:26:36 +0100
Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 12:08:28AM +0200, Vesa Jääskeläinen wrote:
> > 
> > Are you using gfxterm ? If yes, then your font is missing í. Try to load
> > unifont.bf2 or unicode.bf2. I think debian defaults to ascii.bf2 which
> > may not include that glyph.
> 
> Actually, it's us who default to ascii:
> 
> 2008-07-23  Robert Millan  <rmh@aybabtu.com>
> 
> 	[...]
> 
>         * util/update-grub_lib.in (font_path): Prefer ascii.pff over complete
>         fonts, because the latter are too slow.
> 
> before this change, using the complete fonts was incredibly slow in things
> like QEMU or VirtualBox.
> 
> Perhaps there's some way in which this can be optimized, so we can go back to
> using the complete set by default?

I'm optimizing the font rendering now for fonts with many characters.
It was using a linear search (gasp!!) for finding the glyph each time
it is requested.  I just never got around to using the proper data
structure, but I will have this done soon.

I made a text rendering benchmark and added it to 'videotest bench' so
I can objectively measure the improvement achieved.  The improvement
could be significant.  I'll report more later.

Regards,
Colin

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