All Affinity products failing to open or create new project caused by a *font*

[oranjoose]

Windows 10 64-bit
NVIDIA RTX 3070
Any V2 Affinity software

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The problem:

Affinity Designer and Photo would no longer open any file or create a new project without becoming unresponsive or not loading. Half the time it would open and become unresponsive immediately. Half the time it would not load at all, but be found in the Task Manager in order to close.

Coincidence: this happened conspicuously at nearly exactly the moment Serif announced their acquisition by Canva.

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Identified cause of the problem:

After hours of trying just about everything I read about online (reinstall, install older versions, reset all settings, delete AppData files, install desktop exe files instead of Windows Store msix file, reboot Windows, new graphics drivers, turn off hardware acceleration, and probably some more or combination of above), I discovered that what caused this problem was a font, namely this one found on Google Fonts: Aref Ruqaa Ink - Google Fonts .

If Aref Ruqaa Ink is installed in the system, then Affinity is broken.

Does anyone know why a font (one available on Google Fonts no less) would break Affinity? It's not because a font is a variable font, because I've installed a variable font before and Affinity didn't break. The variable font just didn't work properly.

[Bryan Rieger]

The Aref Ruqaa Ink font found on Google Fonts is an SVG colour font, which also doesn't render correctly in the Safari web browser (you see it for a second and then it disappears).

In looking at the font in both FontLab and Glyphs I've noticed there are some undefined mkmk (mark to mark) lookups which could cause issues, but it's most likely that a combination of SVG + colour + undefined mkmk features is causing the problems. I suspect when Affinity loads the available fonts on start-up, this specific font is likely creating an exception and/or race condition somewhere in the apps causing it to hang or crash.

Google Fonts is a great resource, but not all fonts on Google Fonts are created equally—the quality varies greatly (metrics, features, etc)—and as such, not all fonts work as expected.

[kenmcd]

6 hours ago, oranjoose said:

Does anyone know why a font (one available on Google Fonts no less) would break Affinity?

In this particular instance I do not think there is a quality issue with the font.
The font was created by an expert.
And was created to demonstrate advanced font technology.

The font contains three formats:

1. Monochrome  (in the glyf table)
2. COLRv1  (in the COLR table)
3. Color-SVG  (in the SVG table)

My guess is Affinity is confused by the COLRv1.
And simply does not know what to do with it, and gets stuck.

COLRv0 and COLRv1 are both in the COLR table, but have different formats.
My guess is it sees the COLR table, and tries to load it, and chokes on it.

Many browsers support COLRv1.
Some browsers only support Color-SVG.
Browsers should be smart enough to use the format they do support.
So that font should provide color text in most browsers.

Affinity should be smart enough to not get stuck on a format it does not support.

 

[stokerg]

Hi @oranjoose,

Thanks for reporting this.

I've been able to replicate the issue and have just logged this with the Developers  

This thread will get a notification from the Affinity Info Bot when this has been resolved.

[kenmcd]

@stokerg 

The Windows 11 color emoji font recently added the COLRv1 format in addition to the existing COLRv0 format (which Affinity does support currently).

So it is only a matter of time now until an Affinity user asks why their color emojis do not look the same as in other Win11 apps (e.g. Word) which display the COLRv1 versions.

Supporting COLRv1 would solve that issue - and this one.

Please make a note to the devs in AF-2609.