This is a patch to the 39.3 (3.1) or 44.2 (3.5) version of the 
diskfont.library. It adds a disk caching mechanism to the library which keeps 
the list of available fonts. If you have a huge number of fonts 
(I have approx. 300!), the creation of the (first, usually uncached) font 
requester gets much faster: Reading the cache takes usually not more than two 
seconds, parsing the directory tree however used to take half a minute on 
my system.
Starting with the 1.8 release, the cache is kept sorted on request. This will
speed up the "reqtools" font requester even more because its naive sorting
algorithm is more or less bypassed by presenting it a "pre-sorted" font list.
More on this in the guide.

I expected that the folks at H&P would be clever enough to include this as
part of Os 3.5, but they didn't. Needless to say that I'm disappointed.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

New in 1.9

- Included the patch again for the V44 diskfont.library. Except that,
nothing changed.
_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.8    

- Added the option to keep the cache file sorted to speed up the reqtools 
requester even if the font list is already in the internal cache of reqtools. 
This more or less bypasses the naive "insertion sort" algorithm by reqtools 
and replaces it by a smarter "quicksort".
_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.7

- Added a workaround against a bug in Scala: It does not check the return
code of AvailFonts and expects a proper font list even though the function
returned an error condition. The FontCache patch will now try to fill in as
most fonts as possible before failing.
_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.6.1:

- Included a new release of the FixFonts program, release 40.2. This is a
complete rewrite of the original workbench program and does also rewrite
the caches when fixing the fonts.

_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.6:

- Fixed an AMOS compatibility problem; strange, I fixed that one some time 
ago, but I made the same mistake again...

_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.5.1:

- Not a new release of the cache program, but of the guide. I really forgot
to add a "Credits" section. Ooops! Sorry, folks!

_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.5:

- The 1.4 version had a bug that prevented writing the cache for programs
requesting TTextAttrs instead of TextAttrs, i.e. cache types 10002. Added
semaphore protection. Added a check for a file ".nocache" in "_bullet" to
avoid caching a directory.

_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.4:

- Fixed another problem with multiassigns. It was not correctly checked 
whether the cache is really up to date for all directories in a possible 
multiassign.

- Due to code rearrangement, lesser calls to AvailFonts() will suffer now.
This might help to fix some strange AMOS font functions. Check the guide for
details! Thans to Nils Görs for the hint.
_____________________________________________________________________________

New in 1.3:

- Fixed a long standing problem with assign-added font directories which are
  now respected by the cache. Thanks to Dirk Neubauer for the hints.

- Fixed a bug in the 1.2 code that wrote invalid caches from time to time.

_____________________________________________________________________________


New in 1.2:

- Fixed a conflict with BetterOpenLibs. The FontCache is now much more
  system conformal, ROM fonts or scaled fonts do not longer enter the 
  cache list.

- The font cache is again a bit smaller, and fewer cache files are 
  needed.


So long,

	Thomas		October 1999

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
[generic]                    4       4 100.0% -lh0- c0c1 Aug  8  1999 FontCache/ascending
[generic]                    4       4 100.0% -lh0- 9401 Aug  8  1999 FontCache/descending
[generic]                 3527    5136  68.7% -lh5- 54ea Aug  8  1999 FontCache/diskfont.pch
[generic]                 3742    5464  68.5% -lh5- 64c3 Oct 24  1999 FontCache/diskfont_44.pch
[generic]                  775    1016  76.3% -lh5- 02a0 Jan 17  1999 FontCache/FixFonts
[generic]                  255     454  56.2% -lh5- 75a9 Jan 17  1999 FontCache/FixFonts.info
[generic]                 7439   18477  40.3% -lh5- 1000 Oct 24  1999 FontCache/FontCache.guide
[generic]                  285     537  53.1% -lh5- 5b89 Jan 17  1999 FontCache/FontCache.guide.info
[generic]                 1646    4141  39.7% -lh5- a275 Oct 24  1999 FontCache/FontCache.readme
[generic]                 9310   14688  63.4% -lh5- 842a Dec 22  1997 FontCache/spatch
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total        10 files   26987   49921  54.1%            Oct 27  1999