Font backend: Observations on speed on Windows

[Óscar Fuentes]

Today I fired a fresh CVS Emacs and, with great surprise, noticed that
the screen is painted with acceptable speed on my old 550 MHz
machine. The second odd thing is that the font used was not the one I
expected. Emacs was using

-raster-MS Sans Serif-normal-normal-normal-sans-16-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1

so I changed the default font to

-outline-Courier New-normal-normal-normal-mono-16-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1

and the slowness manifested again. It is my impression that it is not so
bad as some weeks ago, though.

Please note that the first font is a raster variable-pitch font, while
the second is a true-type fixed-pitch one. After some experimentation,
the key seems to be true-type. The raster courier font

-raster-Courier-normal-normal-normal-mono-16-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1

is fast too.

Another odd thing is that the "Set Font/Fontset" dialog only shows
fixed-pitch fonts.

Hope this helps to locate the place that makes the new font backend so
slow (for certain fonts, it seems).

-- 
Oscar