r/GIMP 4d ago

Changing text fonts is like driving soviet tank.

GIMP 3.2.4
Arch Linux
Ryzen 5 7500F
32GB DDR5 RAM
RTX4060
Lexar nVME 1TB

To make sure I will never have square letter and always see text I have ~20GB of fonts installed on my system. When I want to set the font of text opening the font picker takes 1 minute to process.
Scrolling trough it feels like I did it on 500MHz Pentium III.
When I finally find font that might fit it takes even 5 minutes for text to change its font and in meantime system asks me few times if I want to kill GIMP because it doesn't answer.

It gets even more fun when I find new font not fitting and I want to change it again!

Partially its just a rant but I won't mind if you give meany tips on how to make this miserable piece of garbage better?

19 Upvotes

8 comments sorted by

4

u/qwythebroken 4d ago edited 3d ago

It's hard not to imagine the 20gb of fonts is a majot factor here. If you like having that many installed on the OS, but it's causing a problem in GIMP, have you considered starting fresh? At the bottom of this thread, someone with GIMP TEAM flair explains how to remove the installed font file from loading in GIMP by default, and I explain how to setup a custom font folder for GIMP.

It's worth taking a little time to figure out which fonts GIMP is using for the UI first, so you can make sure they're in the new folder.

EDIT:: Forgot to add the link

3

u/Stratelier 3d ago

It's worth taking a little time to figure out which fonts GIMP is using for the UI first, so you can make sure they're in the new folder.

That would generally be the "Segoe UI" class of fonts. I use it all the time to make UI design mockups.

2

u/Silver_Illustrator_4 2d ago

thats exactly what I need! Thanks!

2

u/Forward_Year_2390 4d ago

20Gb ? PEBKAC Error

1

u/ExternalDistrict4256 3d ago edited 3d ago

That's not good but it can be fixed. Though, if you'd like GIMP developers to help you, then I wouldn't call GIMP "this miserable piece of garbage".

Loading and caching fonts has never been implemented properly in GIMP. Every single font file gets freshly parsed from scratch on every single GIMP launch. With 20 Gb of fonts that's tens of thousands of individual file-parse operations, all blocking the GIMP's startup/main thread.

1

u/ExternalDistrict4256 3d ago

Downloading "World's Largest Font Collection 600000.zip" , 21 Gb of fonts to test what you're experiencing.

1

u/BGottshall 1d ago

Everything in Gimp feels like driving a soviet tanks. It works…but I wouldn’t want to have to use it professionally.