When Fontlab crashes on Snow Leopard the whole OS crashes

[JamesMontalbano]

Snow Cat 10.6.1 seems to have calmed down the FontLab crashes. I have been running FontLab on 10.6.1 for a few days now and have not had one crash. good news!

[Alex Petrov (FontLab)]

Thank you James for good news.

[JamesMontalbano]

I had one crash today on 10.6.1, but the problem that is emerging it that FL is behaving very slowly when I am working with multiple fonts. I was finishing a font family of 24 fonts and having all open and "Generate All" took several minutes to complete, but the "Save All" was the real bust. It took quite a while, and it never was clear that the program had finished the work. These same two functions were accomplished in a few seconds on the XP Windows side.

The crashes may be less, but the performance with multiple fonts open is seriously impaired!

[drayon]

I had one crash today on 10.6.1, but the problem that is emerging it that FL is behaving very slowly when I am working with multiple fonts. I was finishing a font family of 24 fonts and having all open and "Generate All" took several minutes to complete, but the "Save All" was the real bust. It took quite a while, and it never was clear that the program had finished the work. These same two functions were accomplished in a few seconds on the XP Windows side.

The crashes may be less, but the performance with multiple fonts open is seriously impaired!

In my trivial and brief experience, running FLS on Mac OS X is a disaster, it really is a complete dog of an application ...keep well away, this thing is toxic. I decided to run a WinXP (highly modified ultra lite version) inside a VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine, man this loads WinXP faster than my Mac can launch FL!!! Running FL in WinXP is actually a very pleasant experience. It behaves quite nicely and is very very fast. Unfortunately there are a few annoying caveats :

1: The font window always defaults to Microsoft  char set when I want it Mac OS Roman
2: No Generate Mac Suitecase
3: No ability to open TTC or generate a TTC
4: The encapsulating window design...very bad design as it makes working with dual monitors with different resolutions well ... extremely difficult. Also the title bar of font and glyph windows can (idiotically) slide under the toolbar an the encapsulating window holding the menubar.
5: Never remembers a previously resized glyph window, and it would be a great if each glyph had it's own properties panel to compare glyph properties.

[JamesMontalbano]

We are trying to be helpful here man.

[JamesMontalbano]

I just want to report that under 10.6.1 FontLab seems to be getting more stable. I haven't had a crash in over a week of working. I haven't tried to generate 24 fonts recently so I can't tell if that process has been speeded up but, hey, no crashes in a week is a good thing!

[Glagolitic]

Please offer a Cocao version soon — or an upgrade path to the Windows version.

[ligature]

When can we expect Fontlab Studio 6? Sometime during 2010? Later?

Honestly.

[Glagolitic]

I think the best bet may be to start from scratch. Revive Fontographer, but will full unicode support (get rid of the archaic support for code pages and other outdated features entirely) and in Cocoa, and then develop more features to bring it up to speed to the old Carbon Fontlab.

Think of Quark in the old days. Basic. Got the job done. Best seller. That’s what we need now for font software, but with full unicode support.

[Eljay Love-Jensen (Adobe)]

I'm not a developer, but as far as I know, it is not so hard to do the port:
Carbon -> Cocoa.

I am a developer, so I do know.  And my focus (as it so happens) has been to a large part in porting applications.  PowerPC to Intel.  Carbon to Cocoa.  Windows to Cocoa.  Cocoa to Windows.  Carbon to Java.  Cocoa to Java.  Java to Cocoa.  Amiga to Windows.  Amiga to Carbon.  Cocoa to Linux.  Intel to Alpha.  Intel to HPPA.  Intel i386 (32-bit) to Intel x86_64 (64-bit).  Intel i386 to Itanium.  68000 to PA-RISC.  And many other permutations thereof.

And you are correct, it is not so hard to do the port from Carbon to Cocoa.  It's on par with a port from the Carbon API to Win32 API.  For a project the size of FontLab, I would expect it to take about 10-15 developer years (i.e., a team of 5 developers could do it in about 2-3 years) of focused development.

Assuming not being sidetracked by new features or implementing a new engine.  Or distracted by trying to get the older codebase to work with a new release of the target OS that may have changed some assumptions baked into the older codebase.

It's been about 3 years now...

[Adam Twardoch (FontLab)]

Guys,

you're correct on many counts:

1. Fontographer is being revived. Full Unicode support, OpenType support, I/O from FontLab (e.g. the PostScript-to-TrueType hinting conversion is the same quality as in FontLab Studio), native Intel & PPC binary on Mac and a fresh Windows port, improved user interface, lots of legacy stuff removed. It's really quite promising, it actually is exceeding my expectations I've had when we started the Fontographer 5 project a year ago. Stay tuned for more really soon.

2. FontLab Studio 6 will be a fresh Mac port, available as native Intel & PPC binary. I'm not sure myself if it'll be Carbon or Cocoa (I think Carbon) but it'll certainly work without the Rosetta translation library (which I think is the biggest reason for the Snow Leopard problems). The initial effort was to move the project from the Metroworks compiler to XCode, which I believe is done now. We're also well under way in implementing some new features. Our goal is to have a version out this year.

3. There is also a "fresh-start" modular project under way.

BTW, I'd like to point out that Fontlab Ltd. is a company of the total size of ten or so people. Half of it being developers. (We also work with a few external developers.)

Best,
Adam Twardoch
Fontlab Ltd.

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