[ruby-talk:04228] Re: Partly converted English Ruby/Tk widget demo working.

Hi,

Conrad Schneiker wrote:

> Hidetoshi NAGAI wrote:
>
> > Conrad Schneiker <[e-mail]> writes:
> > > One curious thing that I noticed is that the individual widget demos run
> > > by the Ruby/Tk widget program start up noticeably slower on the AIX
> > > machine than on the NT machine, even though the AIX machine is much
> > > faster. Moreover, Ruby/Tk doesn't seem to be using more than a small
> > > fraction of the available CPU time of the AIX machine. Any idea of what
> > > it might be doing?
> >
> > I think that the problem is based on 'font search'.
> > You wrote
> >
> > > I've got the Ruby/Tk widget demo partly converted from Kanji to English.
> >
> > So, probably some texts to display are Japanese, aren't it?
>
> I guess they try to. I tried installing Japanese fonts, but never got them to
> display. (Maybe I should have changed the setting of LANG.) So what I did next
> was to remove all references to Japanese fonts and variables referencing them.
> Then I would get displays with text with lots of mostly strange symbol
> characters that look like "line noise", possibly due to extended characters
> now being interpreted as single byte characters.
>
> > Many of(?) TrueType fonts on Windows have both of Japanese and English
> > Glyph. But on X, Font files are separated by encoding. If you configure
> > the font to 'Helvetica', Tk will search Japanese 'Helvetica' font to
> > display Japanese text, and if you configure the font to 'Mincho', Tk
> > will search English 'Mincho' font to display English text. But most of
> > X environment will have no Japanese 'Helvetica' font or no English
> > 'Mincho' font. Therefore, Tk must search another font instead of the
> > right font, and it will need long time.
>
> This might explain what is going on, except that I have already removed
> references to Japanese fonts. What I've now noticed is that all of the widget
> demos that I have since converted to standard English/ASCII character strings
> now start reasonably quickly, and that only the unconverted widget demos are
> now very slow starting up. So this problem will hopefully be gone by the end
> of the week, when I hope to finish up.
>
> However, even on the converted widget demos, it seems that Ruby/Tk is not
> finding any of the specified fonts (for example,
> '-*-Helvetica-Bold-R-Normal--*-180-*-*-*-*-*-*') and is apparently using some
> default system font, yet the Tcl/Tk widget demo (running on the same system)
> seems to be able to find them all without any problem. This may result is a
> slow search process, such as what you mentioned above. I see this particular
> problem on both AIX and NT. What is interesting is that places where default
> fonts are used (i.e. such as on buttons and menus where they are not being
> specified by the demo program), Ruby/Tk is finding and using the same sort of
> fonts that Tck/Tk is.

Noting that ext/tk/lib/tkfont.rb referenced $DEBUG in several places, I also tried
running widget with $DEBUG = 1 and got "Exception `RuntimeError' at
./tkencoding.rb:27" several times. Is this typical behavior or is this a serious
problem (possibly indirectly caused by the changes tat I made to widget)?:

# ./widget
wm title . Ruby/Tk Widget Demonstration
==>
"default latin font = Helvetica"
"default kanji font = mincho"
font actual -*-Helvetica-Medium-R-Normal--*-140-*-*-*-*-*-*
==> -family helvetica -size 14 -weight normal -slant roman -underline 0
-overstrike 0
font create @font0000l -slant roman -size 14 -family helvetica -underline 0
-overstrike 0 -weight normal
==> @font0000l
font create @font0000k
==> @font0000k
font actual @font0000k
==> -family fixed -size 9 -weight normal -slant roman -underline 0 -overstrike 0
font configure  -slant roman -size 9 -family fixed -underline 0 -overstrike 0
-weight normal
Exception `RuntimeError' at ./tkencoding.rb:27
font create @font0000c
==> @font0000c
font actual @font0000l
==> -family helvetica -size 14 -weight normal -slant roman -underline 0
-overstrike 0
font configure @font0000c -slant roman -size 14 -family helvetica -underline 0
-overstrike 0 -weight normal
==>
font actual @font0000k
==> -family fixed -size 9 -weight normal -slant roman -underline 0 -overstrike 0
font configure @font0000c -slant roman -size 9 -family fixed -underline 0
-overstrike 0 -weight normal
==>
font configure @font0000c
==> -family fixed -size 9 -weight normal -slant roman -underline 0 -overstrike 0
frame .w0001
==> .w0001
menubutton .w0001.w0002
==> .w0001.w0002
.w0001.w0002 configure -text File
==>
.w0001.w0002 configure -underline 0
==>
<rest of long output snipped.>

--
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)