Commands on server and lack of examples

[Mark Wieder]

On 11/14/19 10:36 AM, Brian Milby via use-livecode wrote:
> Although the concept of the change is simple, the implementation is not trivial.  It may not be that hard for a Mark, but it does look a little involved to me.  The code that does the font stuff isn’t easy to just cut out since so much later depends on those structures being populated.  It may be possible to stub it out where a single static font is loaded, but I’m talking way above my head at this point.

(different Mark here, but...)

Having looked into this a bit previously, it's somewhat more involved 
even than that. There a interlocking pieces among (at least) libskia, 
libcairo, and libharfbuzz, all of which jostle each other to make sure 
there is a complete list of fonts available in the native system. I 
haven't yet seen a way to change this behavior without modifying the 
third-party libraries themselves.

I believe the problem Richard is referring to (RG: correct me if I'm 
wrong about this) is that on startup the engine (and this includes the 
server engine) queries the system for the various places where fonts 
might be stored, then iterates through the list of locations and makes a 
list of all the available fonts on the computer *and* the alternates for 
the fonts it might need for display. I also see the libraries launched 
again for every extension loaded by the system.

-- 
  Mark Wieder
  ahsoftware at gmail.com