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A possible fix for really slow login times in 10.3.6 System
Following the 10.3.6 update, a few people out there noticed that it took quite a bit longer to get from the login window to your desktop. Apparently having a large number of fonts installed on your system causes 10.3.6 to slow down during the login process. For some like myself, having 1,000+ fonts installed was killing my machine and causing a 10 minute wait time to log in.

The solution is simply to remove as many as you can. A list of default fonts and their locations for Panther is available here should you choose to revert to defaults. In addition, you may find Apple's command line font tools useful. After installing them, you can use this command:
ftxinstalledfonts -f > ~/Desktop/installedfonts.txt
to get a full list of fonts currently installed on your system. When done, you'll find a file called installedfonts.txt on your desktop.

[robg adds: The really cool bit in this hint (to me, anyway) is the existence of an Apple command-line font tools package. It's a comprehensive pacakge, and includes eight separate font applications, all installed in /usr/bin. Each seems to have a nice man page as well. You'll also get a detailed "how-to" PDF in your /Developer -> Documentation folder (in its own FontTools folder). I modified the above command by adding a -l flag, which includes the full path to each font. This command is fast, too -- it listed 343 fonts on my machine to the specified desktop file in something like a second.]
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A possible fix for really slow login times in 10.3.6 | 6 comments | Create New Account
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Another neat font tool for the Terminal-ly impaired
Authored by: Bookman on Nov 29, '04 10:58:20AM

The existence of the command line font tools are indeed a fine thing, but those "graphically orientated" individuals out there (like me) should also know about the Font Sampler script. When run, this AppleScript (found at /Applications/AppleScript/Example Scripts/Info Scripts/Font Sampler.scpt) creates an RTF file showing samples of all of the fonts installed on your system. Double click on Font Sampler.scpt to open the script in Script Editor, click Run, and it will build the document and convert the font samples before your eyes--fun to watch.

Rob alluded to this script way back in the year '01 in this hint.

--Books

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Another neat font tool for the Terminal-ly impaired
Authored by: grondin on Nov 29, '04 12:30:56PM
I don't know AppleScript, but the
set the font_list to {"American Typewriter",...
line tells me that this script only returns a listing of those fonts - not all installed.

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Another neat font tool for the Terminal-ly impaired
Authored by: Bookman on Nov 29, '04 02:30:44PM

You are right, of course. Those look like the Mac OS X-installed fonts.

One could manually (and carefully) add to the script the names of additional fonts listed from one's ftxinstalledfonts list. I came up with over 350 in mine.

I wonder if there is a way to automatically integrate the ftxinstalledfonts list with the Font Sampler script. Afraid that's way beyond my ken.

--Books



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A possible fix for really slow login times in 10.3.6
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Nov 29, '04 11:34:32AM

I also have a very large number of fonts on my system, but never have them all active at once. It's important to use some kind of font management, so I use Suitcase X1. This way I have access to all my fonts, but only activate the ones I need.

---
G4/466, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.3.6



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Why does this make login slow?
Authored by: rainwadj on Nov 29, '04 11:42:17AM

If the command line tool can find and list that many fonts in a second, why would having a lot of fonts make login so slow? Is there just some lack of optimization at work, or is login doing more than just making a list of what fonts are available so that Finder knows where to find them?



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Why does this make login slow?
Authored by: ElectusUnum on Nov 29, '04 09:00:48PM

I'd never claim to be any expert, but my own guess is it has something to do with font caching at login? Still, there were never problems _prior_ to the 10.2.6 update so who knows :)



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