Re: Lilypond taking forever to typeset

[Masamichi Hosoda]

>>> I wonder if fc-cache became more "nosy", trying to extract more data
>>> from fonts than it did in the past or if it's just my perception (or
>>> perhaps my computer became slower :).
>>
>> Probably the former.  Perhaps it helps if you try the latest
>> fontconfig release, 2.12.0 – I think I saw something about speed
>> improvements...
> 
> This is what I seem to have installed (and the one that took 2.5 - 3.5
> minutes). I don't know which version is shipped with lilypond though.

If you use LilyPond 2.19.45 binary which is downloaded from LilyPond website,
fontconfig version is 2.11.95.

Maybe, you can see the version by the following command.

$ ./LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/fc-list --version

> The main problem is that lilypond needs those "2-10" minutes the first
> time when it is being run. Which is exactly the critical moment when
> the first-time users might give up.
> 
> On Linux you probably have a common fc database shared among all
> software and you most likely generated the database already during the
> initial linux installation (and probably many times after that). In
> those cases the incremental database helps. For a Mac (and
> perhaps/probably Windows?) Lilypond creates its own copy of the font
> database. At the time of the first lilypond execution that database
> doesn't exist and so the first lilypond run take minutes to complete
> (it might be faster on those new super-fast computers with SSD etc.).

I've tried on Windows.
I deleted the cache files.
Then, I invoked LilyPond for Windows (from LilyPond website).

It took about 8 minutes.
The environment does not have TeX Live fonts.
But it has many Japanese fonts (about 50 Japanese fonts).