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Spotlight: copying fonts starts ATSServer - why?
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Switzerland
Status:
Offline
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I wonder why copying fonts (say, from an old OS9 backup disk) to a spotlighted -i.e. not excluded- disk makes mdimport start ATSServer.
I'm not activating the fonts or anything, they're not even near my home folder... why does Apple Type Services need to know about these fonts and suck up almost all CPU cycles for about half an hour in the process?
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MBP 15" 2.33GHz C2D 3GB 2*23" ACD
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Status:
Offline
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Most likely, it will scale back on the CPU cycles if you run something else, and not actually cause much of a slowdown if any. This said, I've never actually seen ATSServer take up that much CPU time, and it leads me to wonder if there's a problem. Is your system actually any slower while ATSServer is running?
However, as to why ATSServer needs to know about them, the answer is somewhat easier: it needs to know about them so that it can use them.
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You are in Soviet Russia. It is dark. Grue is likely to be eaten by YOU!
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Switzerland
Status:
Offline
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Originally Posted by Millennium
Most likely, it will scale back on the CPU cycles if you run something else, and not actually cause much of a slowdown if any. This said, I've never actually seen ATSServer take up that much CPU time, and it leads me to wonder if there's a problem. Is your system actually any slower while ATSServer is running?
However, as to why ATSServer needs to know about them, the answer is somewhat easier: it needs to know about them so that it can use them.
Thanks for the explanations, Millenium!
It was a folder with around 1'000 PostScript fonts, so maybe that's why ATSServer was so busy.
What I still don't get is why ATSServer has to know about these fonts. They're not active and likely will, for the most part, remain that way. When I do use one of those fonts, I import it into Font Agent Pro and activate it from there. Guess what happens then: ATSServer is kicking in again. So why would it need to scan all the fonts on any given disk and put them into a font db in /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/ ? Even if I used Apple's own FontBook, fonts only get activated after they're moved into ~/Library/Fonts AFAIK.
Just curious. 
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MBP 15" 2.33GHz C2D 3GB 2*23" ACD
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Nagoya, Japan • 日本 名古屋市
Status:
Offline
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Hi, workerbee. I noticed the same thing when my inactive font archive was being indexed by Spotlight. My guess is that Spotlight indexes some font data that it needs ATSServer to read, and ATSServer doesn't seem to be the most efficient program in the world.
What exactly Spotlight is getting from ATSServer, I'm not sure. I thought it might index glyph names or character sets, but after trying some Spotlight searches, that doesn't seem to be the case.
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