[mapguide-internals] Server Font Queries

[Walt Welton-Lair]

The Freetype library gets initialized at startup, and then the server loads all fonts in the system font folder.  Once the server is running it does not check again for new fonts.

There's probably some optimization that can be done here, e.g. lazy loading of fonts.  But in the case of your Asian font, if we don't load it at startup and instead load it on demand, then when a layer using that font is stylized it will take an extra 30 seconds (on your server) the first time.  That doesn't make for a good user experience.

Also keep in mind that stylization supports font matching - if a specified font is not found then it iterates through the available fonts looking for a reasonably close one.  At that point the server will have to load all the fonts.  So it's a tradeoff.  Is it better to load them all at the beginning, at a time when no users are active?  Or load them on demand, forcing users to wait longer the first time they make a request which uses an unloaded font?

Walt

-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Crispin_at_1Spatial
Sent: Friday, November 06, 2009 6:18 AM
To: mapguide-internals at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [mapguide-internals] Server Font Queries


Folks,

For MapGuide text and font symbols the definition of the font is contained
in the layer XML.

When authoring layers in Maestro there is a hard-coded set of fonts from an
XML file.  These are pretty standard but limits flexibility, especially when
dealing with symbol fonts that may have been loaded on to the server.  Is
there a way through the MapGuide API do do font discovery?

Finally, I noticed on a low-powered server that at MG service start-up
(using FileMon) there was a huge amount of font polling.  A couple of Asian
sets (Batang) took 30+ seconds of MG server processing.

 Crispin

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