FontSpeed

by Tony Howat


Font Speed is a useful utility which can dramatically improve the time it takes to boot your system.

RISC OS 3 allows font directories to contain a Messages file which allows you to give alternative names for fonts. This is useful when font directories will be distributed internationally, so that names can be translated, and it can also prove useful for those who are used to other platforms with different font names (such as Times rather than Trinity). The real advantage of having a Messages file, however, is that RISC OS will use it to read the list of fonts in the directory rather than scanning the directory itself. Scanning through fonts in the normal way is a slow process, particularly if you have many fonts. Using messages files can dramatically improve your system's boot time.

What FontSpeed does is to generate Messages files for font directories, saving you the trouble of having to list all your fonts and styles manually.

Using FontSpeed
Once FontSpeed is loaded you can generate Messages files for your font directories in one of two ways. The simplest is to click on the icon, and from the resulting window you can start the process of generating messages for all the font directories which are currently registered with the font manager. The other method is to drag the individual font directories to the FontSpeed icon to generate the Message files individually.

Once you have run FontSpeed on your font directories, you should notice a speed increase when booting them: on my system I have four full font directories, and using FontSpeed has reduced the average boot time of my system by 18 seconds. The magnitude of the speed increase depends on how many fonts you have; the more you have, the more effect a Messages file will produce.

Features
FontSpeed deals with base encodings, specific encodings and fonts with multiple alphabets, as well as normal fonts. If a message file already exists in a directory, the entries with data after their tags are read into memory.The messages file is then regenerated, and if any of the font tags which had data in the previous file appear, the old data is written after them, thus preserving any aliases you may have set previously.

Copyright  RISC User magazine 1997
