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Comment by pcunite | Hacker News Reader

Not sure where this is stored on Mac, but on Windows, clear the fontconfig directory in the AppData folder.

That's not really likely to help. The main issue appears to be that since fontconfig (a lib used by GIMP) is only "native" to Linux, for it to know about the TTF files, it has to scan them all and build it's cache at startup. For people with hundreds of fonts installed it can be a real PITA.

I avoid it by being careful to not exit GIMP entirely (simply closing all the editing windows) until I am sure I won't need it again for awhile.

It fixed the font loading forever for me on Windows.

Yeah, you most likely got rid of an existing cache, which couldn't be updated due to file locking. That issue is fixed in recent versions of the fontconfig library.

A fairly current one is shipped with the 2.9.6 installer, so many of the infamous issues should be gone.

The fontconfig cache is created on all platforms - it's just that this step is usually done when installing the system or adding new fonts from the package manager for your average Linux distro. Granted, it also works much faster there in general.

Adding a few new fonts for a specific project does not cause long delays on any platform.

A compounding issue was that file locking issues prevented successful cache updates on the Windows platforms until recent versions of fontconfig, this lead to a long startup time on every start.

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