Linux and application installing

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 9 septembre 2010 14:29, Alex Hudson a écrit :
> On Thu, 2010-09-09 at 13:49 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> Le Jeu 9 septembre 2010 12:24, Alex Hudson a écrit :
>> > What you really want is a font store which has functionality like this:
>> >
>> > 	http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview#font-family=Cantarell
>>
>> What you do not realize is that this kind of preview works by having the
>> complete font file downloaded by the browser in the background, in other
>> words
>> it is as resource intensive as just installing the font package and playing
>> with the font locally. The only thing this kind of preview buys you is
>> automatic font de-installation when you close the browser.
>
> Well, we seem to be descending into technicalities now, but I did
> realise that. I just don't think it matters. Let's examine the claim you
> made that it is "as resource intensive as installing the font package".
>
> .TTF fonts (as an example) just aren't very big. I tried a sample font
> in my .fonts directory, it's 75K and five lines of varied "The quick
> brown fox.." in PNG format comes out at 25K. If I gzip the ttf, it's
> 28K, and the png goes to 22K. So the data size is actually pretty close.

The google type library is not representative as they do not propose full
fonts but fonts cut down to the few hundreds of glyphs necessary for latin.
The smallest the font the closest the size will be to a preview file.

Typical full-featured modern fonts (even excluding cjk fonts) are a lot fatter.

> The RPM is 115K, including 94K of preview PDF (which also has the font
> embedded into it.. even though we know it's on the system?!).

The rpm uses the pdf upstream provided, you can ask the packager to remove it
or split it in a separate package

> So, I disagree it's "as resource intensive" as the RPM method. It's
> fundamentally much faster than installing the font locally. Seriously,
> just try it. It's not even in the same league.

It's more resource-intensive server-side and the whole speed depends on your
network pipe. If you have a fat network pipe you do not need a "font store",
just install all the font packages in Fedora and be done with it.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot