Problem with fc-cache

Question

Using PrintDraft takes an extremely long time on my machine–over 4 minutes. About 3 minutes of that time PT shows “Gathering Font Information” and checking the background processes shows that fc-cache.exe is .

Does anyone know of a way to speed up this process? I would think that, as the name suggests, the font information would be cached and this process would only need to be run when new fonts had been added to the system.

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Having solved my own problem while writing this, I’ll also post the solution for the undoubtedly thousands of people who will search for the same problem here in the years to come By the way, my print times are now about 5-10 seconds.

It appears that I did not have write permission for the C:\Program Files (x86)\Paratext 8\xetex\share\texmf-dist\fonts\cache directory, which is where the cache was stored. I deleted the information in that directory, ran PT with administrator permissions, and ran PrintDraft. Doing that refreshed the cache and subsequent runs (in non-admin PT) skipped the caching process.

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I don’t think I’ve ever changed permissions for that folder, so I’m assuming PT set them when it installed. Does anyone know if this is the default? If so, I’ll report it as a bug.

Answer 1

Great catch! I looked for the cache directory and didn’t have one (even after a Print Draft). I went to C:\Program Files (x86)\Paratext 8\xetex\bin and ran fc-cache.exe (I ran as administrator) and then noticed that the cache folder was created. I closed and opened Paratext and ran a print draft and it took a couple of seconds as you mentioned.

Go ahead and write up a bug report on this.

Comments

User mention this problem from time to time, but I have never known Printdraft to be fast so I thought it was normal.

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In the past it was always slow on the first run, and then subsequently it was much, much faster. But in recent builds (and I’m not exactly sure when it changed) it was being VERY VERY slow for each and every PrintDraft (which indicates that the font-cache was being rebuilt each time). So thank your +mnjames and anon848905 for the great tip.

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Thanks for the replies. I’ve submitted a bug report.

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I suspect the best way to fix this bug is to have the font cache in a folder that is already writable by the user. That is, something folder in the user’s profile, rather than Program Files.

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It does seem like a fairly easy fix, but the response to my bug report indicated it had received a fairly low priority status–something about only working on this when it could be done alongside another similar problem.

Anyway, in the meantime @anon848905’s suggestion of fc-cache.exe externally and as admin would fix the problem, and would only need to be periodically when the cache had expired and PrintDraft starts slowly again.

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Bobby:

I suspect the best way to fix this bug is to have the font cache in a folder that is already writable by the user. That is, something folder in the user’s profile, rather than Program Files.

mnjames:

It does seem like a fairly easy fix, but the response to my bug report indicated it had received a fairly low priority status

The issue is that fc-cache.exe is a part of XeTeX and the code is not controlled by the Paratext developers. Even changing something simple might be difficult when having to work with the developers of XeTeX to get it changed.

Answer 2

fc-cache.exe as admin, worked great today for me!