I put this on mantis, since i'm sure this applies to squeak3.10 and Pharo both. http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7338 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> Date: 2009/4/19 Subject: A little font rendering speedup To: Pharo Development <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr> This is an image-side change, which makes a primitiveDisplayString to not fail because StrikeFontSet returns nil for (font characterToGlyphMap). Since the code, which using fast primitive looks like following:     self primDisplayString: aString from: startIndex to: stopIndex             map: font characterToGlyphMap xTable: font xTable             kern: kernDelta I thought, why one would return nil in ( font characterToGlyphMap ). Since #xTable in StrikeFontSet implemented as following: xTable     "Answer an Array of the left x-coordinate of characters in glyphs."     ^ (fontArray  at: 1) xTable. i think it is safe to do similar in characterToGlyphMap , this allows the primitive to work w/o failure, because otherwise, if you look at implementation of primDisplayString: aString from: startIndex to: stopIndex map: glyphMap xTable: xTable kern: kernDelta in fallback code it does same thing again (and ignoring glyphMap at all, btw). To bench a difference, leave a couple of windows with text in world and then do: [10 timesRepeat: [World fullDrawOn: World assuredCanvas] ] timeToRun before change:  645 after change:  545 -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.