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?
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
Works fine for me on both the Metrics Window and the Preview Window.
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
James P., type the accented characters in TextEdit, copy them and paste in FontLab. Does it still crash?
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.
My Fontlab crashes everytime I enter diacrits aswell, for example if I want to write åäö right when I start Fontlab, then the program crashes every time, but if I open the å, ä and ö glyph one time before writing in the metrics window it works just fine.
easier...and safer...just to type in /aacute etc.
easier...and safer...just to type in /aacute etc.
What would really be easy would be for Fontlab to get their act together and actually release a working Mac version of Fontlab Studio. They have had six years to get it fixed.
never realized that i could type in /aring /adieresis.
Thanks, that works fine
Why not just select them in the font window and then open a new metrics window?
Or drag and drop into the metrics window - it's a lot quicker than all that typing.
Typing in diacriticals on the Mac is faster than drag-and-drop. We just enter it all in with simple modifier keys as opposed to the alt + numeric codes.
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