Score:0

`fontinst` process running amok with KDE font management

om flag

I have use the KDE font management to disable (when I could) or delete (when I couldn't disable) about two hundred useless fonts (most Noto exotic variants, for a start). I noticed that I refined the search, actions would take an increasing time: deleting the 100+ Noto fonts at the start was quick, deleting a few individual fonts somewhat later would take severam minutes each.

Now when I start the KDE font management the display remains empty and I see a background fontinst process using 2GB and a whole CPU...

I notice that I have a 1050605 lines, 97MB /etc/fonts/disabledfonts.xml that seems to have a lot of duplication:

$ wc -l /etc/fonts/disabledfonts.xml
1050605 /etc/fonts/disabledfonts.xml

$ sort -u /etc/fonts/disabledfonts.xml | wc -l
2021

Any way to fix that mess?

Running a freshly upgraded Kubuntu 22.04...

Score:0
om flag

Edit: Further investigation show that in disabledfonts.xml there is

  <font family="Noto Sans CJK HK" weight="80" width="100" slant="0" langs="en,ja,ko,ru,zh-cn,zh-tw" >
   <file path="/usr/share/fonts/opentype/noto/.NotoSansCJK-Regular.ttc" foundry="GOOG" face="4"/>
  <!-- above line repeated 524288 times (524288=0x80000, coincidence?) --> 
  </font>
  <font family="Noto Sans CJK HK" weight="200" width="100" slant="0" langs="en,ja,ko,ru,zh-cn,zh-tw" >
   <file path="/usr/share/fonts/opentype/noto/.NotoSansCJK-Bold.ttc" foundry="GOOG" face="4"/>
  <!-- above line repeated 524288 times (524288=0x80000, coincidence?) --> 
  </font>

Cleaning this mess with uniq and copying the result to /etc/fonts/disabledfonts.xml seems to have fixed all problems: empty display, response time and CPU usage.

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

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