A possible fix for really slow login times in 10.3.6

Nov 29, '04 09:11:00AM

Contributed by: ElectusUnum

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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