Go to the previous, next chapter.

Improving font rendering time

Although the Sun type renderer (TypeScaler) is pretty fast, it's not as fast as loading a bitmap. You can pre-generate bitmap fonts for sizes that you use a lot, and you can also alter and access the font cache parameters. If you have a lot of memory you might want to increase the font cache size.

    $ psh -i
    Welcome to X11/NeWS Version3      <--- psh will say this at you
    currentfontmem =                  % type this line ...
    300                               % ... my server was using 300 Kbytes
    1024 setfontmem
                                      % Just to check:
    currentfontmem =
    1024

See pp. 328ff of the NeWS 3.0 Programmer's Guide. You need to say psh -i so that the PostScript packages are loaded - see the psh man page.

You could also add the following line to your $HOME/.openwin-init file to perform this task every time you start OpenWindows:

  echo 1024 setfontmem | psh -i > /dev/null 1>&2


Excerpted from The comp.fonts FAQ, Copyright © 1992-96 by Norman Walsh