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very slow to first use Text tool - disk grinding


luckman212

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hi I'm using PDN 3.5.5 final on win7 x64. I am not sure this is really a 'bug' but it is an annoyance. I use paint.net a lot for marking up screenshots, and so I use the text tool quite a bit to annotate. The thing is, after an initial launch, the first time I go to type something with the text tool, the disk grinds away for like 10-12 seconds while it builds some sort of font cache or something. After that, everything is fine until I quit & relaunch PDN again. I did not notice this problem with the 3.3.x builds. So somehow something has changed there......... maybe I have too many fonts installed (I dont think so, I have around 80 I guess) but I wanted to post and see if anyone else has this issue & if there is any workaround. cheers!

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80 fonts doesn't sound like enough to cause any difficulty like you describe.

Your OS setup is very similar to mine and I get no such problems with a larger number of fonts.

I'm frightened on your behalf at the description of your HD "grinding away". To me that sounds like the warning sign of a HD failure! I'd recommend checking your HD immediately and don't ignore this issue: http://www.w7forums.com/use-chkdsk-check-disk-t448.html

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You say this is after "initial launch". Initial after what? Startup / reboot?

Paint.NET on Win7 uses DirectWrite, which does have a font cache of some kind that it builds the first time it is used in a session. You can set it to auto-start from the Services management console. (Although I recommend using "auto (delay start)".) It's simply called "Windows Font Cache Service."

The Paint.NET Blog: https://blog.getpaint.net/

Donations are always appreciated! https://www.getpaint.net/donate.html

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thanks guys. No, nothing to worry about with my HDD. It's working normally and I test it regularly & make daily backups both to a local external HD as well as online via JungleDisk. The "grinding" is just normal HD activity but It is frustrating because it does take quite some time to build this "cache" even though I don't have too many fonts. I did try setting the Windows Font Cache Service to autostart and making sure it was running before launching Paint.NET and it didn't make any difference- the first time I used the text tool there was still the long delay and the heavy HD activity.

I guess it would be nice if PDN built this font cache during launch so the text tool was "ready to use" right away. I believe that's what other apps like Photoshop, MS Word etc do.

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Hi guys, I believe I have fixed this issue on my system.

I searched around on my HD for something related to this Font Cache, and found the following directory:

C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\

Inside were these files, which I deleted (made backups first just in case)

FontCache-S-1-5-21-1948862929-1947518890-988191046-1000-8192.dat

FontCache-System.dat

FontCache3.0.0.0.dat

once these files were deleted, it seemed to build this font cache almost instantly. Maybe one of the files was corrupt or had bad permissions? Anyway, still not 100% sure this fix is permanent but for now, it's worked for me.:D

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I e-mailed with one of the developers on DirectWrite about this. The hypothesis is that the font cache was corrupted somehow due to an improper shutdown (or something). This was causing the font cache service to reject the invalid font cache file (those .dat files you deleted) and rebuild it every time. Deleting the font cache file, as you did, fixes this. This is slightly speculative since we don't have access to your system, of course. Anyway they're aware of the issue now, if they weren't already.

The Paint.NET Blog: https://blog.getpaint.net/

Donations are always appreciated! https://www.getpaint.net/donate.html

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Yes as a matter of fact I do have the files.

There are 2 sets, one from 4/29 and the other from 5/3. They are slightly different but I believe both cause this problem to manifest itself. They are both included in the ZIP archive:

bad_font_cache_files.zip

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