All Affinity Apps freeze on Font Selection

[AlanH]

This has started happening to me over the last couple of weeks on all 3 Affinity apps, on both my PCs.

All Affinity apps freeze solid when I attempt to select a new font for text in the document.

I first noticed it in Designer, as I use it all the time, but the same is true in Publisher and Photo. It seems marginally worse in Publisher, which is why I'm reporting it here.

This problem has been reported multiple times in the Affinity Forum over the lifetime of the Affinity products (often regarding Asian fonts, which is not the case for me), but no solid fix seems to be evident, and the threads just seem to peter out.

I have reduced the number of fonts on my Office machine as far as possible, and am down to barely more than the system fonts, and I have never had font problems before - I am not a 'font hoarder'!

This fault seems to have appeared since I upgraded to a 4K monitor about 3 months ago. One of the reports indicated a link with 4K monitors on the Mac bug-reporting thread, but the suggested fix (settings for memory usage?) wasn't applicable to the PC.

When the program locks up/freezes, it does so pretty hard, and requires several attempts to kill it via Task Manager.

When it's frozen, Task Manager reports it as using 930MB RAM and 33.3% CPU (the latter looks like a pre-set limit).

(update 16 Dec) This happens even with screen resolution set down to 1920x1080. Appears to happen when scrolling swiftly up or down through font list with text selected - doesn't seem to happen if stepping down a font at a time (but that's a very slow way of finding fonts...)

My machines are reasonably spec'd with fully updated OS & drivers, so I wouldn't think there is a hardware or OS issue:

• Office PC: Win10 Home on i7-930 with 8GB RAM and 2GB video card
• Video Edit PC: Win10 Pro on i7-6700 with 32GB RAM and 8GB video card.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Regards,

Alan

[Jon P]

@AlanH Can you check if you also get this behavior in the latest beta here?

If so, could you please zip and upload your Windows/Fonts folder to this link? I'll see if I can reproduce it with your fonts installed

Uploading a crash report found in %appdata%\Affinity\Publisher\1.0\crashreports will be useful too.

Thanks

[AlanH]

Hi @Jon P - Thanks for the suggestions. I have had a go at them this evening:

a) I downloaded the beta version and using the same document, I could not get it to lock up while scrolling fonts - admittedly exercising it only for a few minutes, but that's much longer than the current active version. In case my computer had suddenly got better,  I went back and re-checked the current version, and it still locked up in about half a dozen font select scrolls. That may be a good sign, but why would the Beta behave differently?

b) Re. the Crash Reports, the only place with an Affinity folder is Roaming, i.e. C:\Users\Alan\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Publisher\1.0\CrashReports but the \reports folder under that is empty. I think Publisher is locking so hard that it cannot actually 'crash' i.e. close down, so no crash report is being written when I finally get fed up with waiting (up to several minutes) and terminate it via Task manager.

c) Re. fonts, I have limited experience with fonts beyond installing and removing them via the c:\windows\fonts folder. Two observations:

1. When I select them all and try to zip them, 7-zip tells me there are duplicate file names and refuses to work. I read somewhere on the web that the 'real' font files are in c:\Windows\SxS\ and when I search the massive list of folders under that for *.ttf, I do see most fonts appearing twice and some three or four times. It's a mystery to me, I'm afraid.

2. I have tried to remove all unnecessary fonts as part of this exercise, but find some will not respond to the Remove option, and stay in greyed-out form.

So the Beta seems to be better, but maybe my current font situation is not 'textbook' and needs some rationalising, but that's outside my skill-set at the moment!

Regards,

Alan

 

[AlanH]

Something springs to mind - this problem seems to have arisen since I purchased the Christi's Comix Toolbox brushes set and installed them across the Affinity suite. Any possible connection?

[Jon P]

Well it's good news the beta is better, there have been a couple of changes in this area so i'd advise just sticking with the beta if that's not an issue.

Things like seeing fonts appear multiple times can be expected depending on what fonts/variants you have installed etc.

[AlanH]

@Jon PThanks, I will do that pro tem. Have a good Christmas!

(finally figured how to do that "mention" thing!)