Prevent Glyph Builder window from blocking other processes?

[colinmford]

Hi @typemytype,

You know me — I absolutely love this extension, we use it for everything.

The only issue is that, while the window is open, and there's a lot of glyphs in the MultiLineView, it slows all of RoboFont down. I would expect it to take a second to update the glyphs if an anchor is moved or an outline is edited or something, but it seems like every action in RF takes a bit longer when the Glyph Builder window is open.

So I was thinking of ways we could fix this... one simple option might be a checkbox that toggles the auto update for the MultiLineView? I could switch it off, do my work, and click the "update" button when I wanted to see an update. Lo-fi but it might work.

Another is, is there some way we can re-configure the observers so it just updates when the default layer glyph art is changed, and not, say, when background art is changed, or font info is updated?

A final option (which I would have no idea right now how to implement) is we could use async? Now that the RF beta has coresyncio, is there a way we could allow the updating to happen without blocking the rest of RoboFont? As I said, I don't know entirely how this would work, and might end up needing to be in MultiLineView instead...

Any other thoughts?

[typemytype]

the last options should not be so difficult... I will check it out

[typemytype]

could you tryout the async branch version for the glyph construction extension?

[colinmford]

@typemytype Thanks for making all this! Sure, I'll give it a spin when I get a minute. 😊