Affinity 2.1 long font loading time

[JELF]

Hi, Since the upgrade to 2.1, all three Affinity programs take around 1 min 20 sec each to power up due to long font loading times.

My font situation did not change between 2.0 and 2.1 but there is a significant change in loading times post the upgrade

I am running Windows 10 on on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with 16GB memory and a RTX3070Ti GPU

I have tried to reduce my number of installed fonts by half but have not seen any impact in load times (approx 500 fonts currently installed)

Having read on a previous topic that a missing font for an asset can cause this delay, I have gone through all my assets and also deleted all assets containing text, but no change to loading times with these actions

 

Any ideas would be welcome

Thanks

Jose

[kenmcd]

Something else is going on.
I have 3,163 fonts installed and APub v2.1 on Win10 starts in about 10 seconds.
And that is on an above average Dell XPS laptop, not a super fast desktop.

Which version did you install the downloadable .msi, or the .msix from a store?

 

[Komatös]

Hi @JELF and welcome to the forum.

Serif has made a few changes to the hardware acceleration that can lead to 'unfavorable' effects with indeterminate hardware/driver configurations.

Disable the hardware acceleration under Edit -> Settings -> Performance and observe after restarting the program if the response time has improved.

Before you disable the hardware acceleration, please check if the AMD system drivers (chipset) and the NVIDIA gpu driver are up to date!

https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/b550

 

[stokerg]

Hi @JELF,

Please try the advice already posted and let us know how it goes.  I'm not aware of any issues of slow loading caused by the number of installed fonts, so it will likely be something else causing this.

[JELF]

Hi All,

 

Thank you for the feedback and suggestions.

I have updated GPU and chipset drivers and loaded affinity designer with hardware acceleration and without hardware acceleration. No visible difference in loading times (still well over 1 minute being stuck with the "font loading" message)

I have also tried to re-install he program and have used the download from my account in the store (.msix) and problem persists

 

[kenmcd]

21 hours ago, JELF said:

No visible difference in loading times (still well over 1 minute being stuck with the "font loading" message)

I wonder if some of your fonts are the issue.

Some CJK fonts can have well over 20,000 characters which can take awhile to load.
Some TTC files with multiple fonts can also be slow to load.
Any OTC files? Those can currently confuse many applications (some just choke).
Hmmm... have not checked APub to see what it does, should do that.

You could try un-installing some suspect fonts.
Such as those described above.
And free fonts found out in the ether which can often be broken, and cause odd issues like slow loading.
Just disabling the fonts in Windows does not work.

Scan your fonts folders to see if there are any duplicate font files with number suffixes.
Such as FontName_01.ttf which is a duplicate of FontName.ttf 
These duplicates can confuse Affinity applications.
They are caused by installing another version while a font file is locked by some application.
Check both the Windows Fonts folder and your User Fonts folder.

Also, happy to scan a list of your installed fonts to see if anything jumps out at me.

 

[JELF]

Thanks for the suggestions Ken. Some good actions to follow up on. 
i am traveling internationally at the moment and will return on the weekend where I will look into these suggestions.

will advise once done.

[JELF]

So, I have looked into the installed fonts and did not see any specific issues. I have de-installed most non-system fonts to the point that I only have 176 fonts installed per the attached screenshot. The affinity apps still take 1 minute and 10 seconds to load with the splash screen indicating that the program is loading fonts.

Running out of ideas to get the program to load normally

 

[walt.farrell]

Do you have a font manager running, @JELF?

If so, does the startup time improve if you turn the font manager off before starting the application?

Also, do you have all three programs running (or starting) at the same time? If so, does the startup time improve if you only start one of them?

[debraspicher]

FWIW, I have both Roman and a fair number of CJK & m+ fonts installed on Windows 10. 1194 total. No problems here.

[JELF]

I have no font manager running when I load the affinity program.

I have also terminated all unnecessary programs via task manager to make sure there is no clash.

All three Affinity programs behave in the same way and I load them individually. They all take approximately the same loading time (1 minute 10 seconds)

[Scrabo]

Would be nice to only load the fonts that you use rather then the world

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Scrabo said:

Would be nice to only load the fonts that you use rather then the world

Then how would it know which fonts are available, to display in the font selection parts of the interface? And how would it know what they look like so it can show samples?

[JELF]

Having exhausted all options I could think of, I took the decision of upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This has reloaded the base fonts and I was hoping that any OS related issue that may be causing the long font loading time would be resolved.

Unfortunately the behaviour is still exactly the same, 1minute 10 seconds loading time stuck with the message" loading fonts"

I have now:

- re-installed all three affinity programs and have them at the latest level

- Killed all unnecessary programs and services via Task Manager to ensure there is no conflict

- de-installed all fonts with the exception of windows base fonts (in windows 10)

- upgraded to Windows 11

Any other ideas would be welcome... 

[JELF]

Just to wrap this discussion, I have now resolved issue.

This was achieved by resetting Fills, Brushes Object styles and Text styles  in the \Settings\Miscellaneous menu

My suspicion is that I may have had an issue in the Object styles which transferred from version to version. The delay indicating "loading Fonts" was misleading.

 

Nice to see the app power up in seconds now!

[NilsFinken]

On 7/4/2023 at 1:22 PM, JELF said:

Just to wrap this discussion, I have now resolved issue.

This was achieved by resetting Fills, Brushes Object styles and Text styles  in the \Settings\Miscellaneous menu

Resetting Fills, Brushes Object styles and Text styles  in the \Settings\Miscellaneous menu did not solve it for me. It seems that the Beta 2.2.01954 has quashed the problem, though. Looking greatly forward to the release of 2.2 🙂

Edited August 22, 2023 by NilsFinken
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