Changing the Composer or starting the Prototyper takes very long time

Question

When changing the composer window or starting the Prototyper, sometimes it takes very long before I can start working. How to avoid this?

Answer 1

This happens usually if you have many font resources with a large font range. If changing the composer window, EmWi needs to run the resource converter to convert all referenced resources for the current composer window. If you have set the font range attribute e.g.: to the full range for the Chinese character set, you can imagine that the converting takes some time. This affects the start of the Prototyper in the same way.

Since version V5.30 Embedded Wizard provides a caching mechanism that avoids that all used fonts resources are converted every time the Prototyper starts or the Composer page is changed. This feature reduces the loading time drammatically for large character sets (e.g. Far East fonts).

Nevertheless it is recommended to reduce the font range to the necessary characters only. To reach this, each font resource possesses the attribute ‘Ranges’. There you can add single character codes combined with character ranges, for example:

Default  = 0x20-0x7F;
German   = 0x20-0x7F;
Italian  = 0x20-0x7F, 0xEC;
Russian  = 0x20-0x7F, 0x430-0x435, 0x438, 0x43A, 0x43B, 0x43D-0x443,
           0x446, 0x447, 0x44C, 0x44F;
Japanese = 0x20-0x7F, 0x571F, 0x65E5, 0x66DC, 0x6708, 0x6728, 0x6C34,
           0x706B, 0x91D1;

If you work with our Excel template file ‘Strings.xls’ for string generation and import, you can even generate the font ranges from the used string constants with the integrated macro ‘FontRange’.

Comments

The usage of many very large images within a UI component may also result in a long delay time when opening a Composer window or starting the Prototyper. In this case, the conversion of the bitmap resources take a certain time.
Please consider, that too many or too large images may require a lot of memory on your target system!