On Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:00:15 +0100, <netsurf-dev-request(a)netsurf-browser.org&gt; wrote: Thanks for the additional background information, James. Certainly 18 x 65k would be a bit heavy! I couple of thoughts occur: - RUfl could pick the most "neutral"-styled font (no slant, medium weight) it can find when there are multiple options for a point in the substitution table. Ideally, it would be a bit intelligent about it, and favour choosing fonts it had already used in the table, to avoid a mish-mash of fonts creeping in. - Although 18 tables would probably be overkill, three (65,536 * 3 =~ 197k ) might be a compromise between memory footprint and aesthetics: One for "no-style", one for "average italics" and one for "average bold"? - In my case, I have a font family with about 7 different weights (no slants) all defining the same glyphs, one of which RUfl is using for the majority of points in the substitution table. If RUfl could be aware of "equal" fonts - fonts in the same family that define exactly the same subset of glyphs, just in varying styles - it could match the weight/slant as a second step after looking up the codepoint in the (still 65k) substitution table. Of course, that would only be of help when the user has families of fonts defining the same glyphs, as described, but that's probably not all that infrequent. - Is the substitution table statically linked to each binary that uses RUfl? I guess it must be. If the substitution table were to grow much in size, and as more and more software starts to use RUfl (as I hope will be the case), there's perhaps an argument for moving it into a module and only maintaining a single set of tables for all apps? In fact, the best thing would be if it could hook into the Font Manager and provide its functionality to all apps "for free". Unfortunately, as I've recently discovered, FontV isn't actually implemented in any version of RISC OS. But the Font Manager itself could be modified. I'm not sure what the deal is with modules that take 10 minutes or so to start up, though (as could be the case when RUfl indexes fonts)! To be clear - I'm certainly not expecting anyone to do anything about this (i.e. coding); I'm just interested in discussing options here. If a suitable consensus of opinion emerges, I'd be happy to look at making a patch/patches when I have a bit more time. Thanks, WPB