Fontlab crashes when entering diacritic characters into the metrics window

James Puckett
24.Jun.2008 3.51pm
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When I bring up characters with diacritics in Fontlab (5.04 on OS X 10.4) using their keyboard commands Fontlab often crashes. For example, if I use Opt+‘ followed by e to bring up egrave, Fontlab crashes. It seems to happen after I’ve already entered other diacritic characters. I‘ve tried removing my preferences and uninstalling/reinstalling Fontlab with no luck. Is this a common problem?



James Arboghast
24.Jun.2008 4.22pm
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You just never know when Fontlab is going to crash. It’s no better on a PC than on a Mac or vice-a-versa. I’ve not yet encountered the crashing condition you describe, but then I don’t use shortcut keys like that to enter accented characters. I learned to spell out the glyph names, eg: /acircumflex, ccedilla etc. I find that easier than remembering shortcut keys, but then writing is something I actually enjoy doing so it’s not for everyone.

Save your file often. I hit command + s after every edit or at least every ten edits. You just never know when Fotnlab is going to crash.

j a m e s


Miguel Sousa
25.Jun.2008 12.11pm
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Works fine for me on both the Metrics Window and the Preview Window.


James Arboghast
25.Jun.2008 2.18pm
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The other thing to check out is your keyboard. Try plugging in a different keyboard from another Mac and see if that makes any difference. I’ve seen keyboards cause other apps to crash. It’s a long shot, but possible.

j a m e s


Miguel Sousa
25.Jun.2008 4.50pm
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James P., type the accented characters in TextEdit, copy them and paste in FontLab. Does it still crash?


James Puckett
25.Jun.2008 5.15pm
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I can copy and paste, but sometimes not all of the characters paste over. Right now my workaround is to just paste over names of the characters kept in a text file. Oddly, now I am seeing characters appear in the color of dependent pairs…and what is a dependent pair, anyway? It’s not defined in the manual.