Bizarre problem with FontLab OT features panel

ahleman4 May 2012

On a Mac running 10.6.8 and FontLab Studio 5.0.2, after a system restart yesterday began to see very bizarre behavior in the OT features panel. It's hard to describe, but the OT panel seems to be inserting extra spaces into all the text in the OT panel, so that nothing compiles correctly, and clicking on any of the text or typing causes more extra space to appear to the left of the cursor. In other words it's impossible to format correctly, because any action I take just creates more bizarre spacing. I cannot edit, add, or compile OT features.

I went and upgraded to the newest version of FontLab, 5.1.1, and the problem stays the same. Don't know if the problem is with FontLab or the computer itself, but the keyboard and trackpad seem to be behaving normally in all other applications.

I used Screen Record to make a movie of the behavior, but it's much too big to post. Has anyone seen this behavior before or have any ideas?

oldnick4 May 2012#

I claim no special expertise, but I am reasonably confident that what appears to be the problem is not the real problem. Feature coding follows the same format as CSS coding. CSS code ignores irrelevant spaces, so I imagine feature coding would as well. Some other bad juju must be at work…

agisaak6 May 2012#

Are you sure it's inserting spaces as opposed to simply *displaying* extra space?

When I first switched from FL4 to FL5, I found the OT panel to be completely unusable due to bad spacing/extra space issues which resulted in the cursor's apparent and actual positions not matching; I quickly discovered the reason for this -- they'd changed the default font for the OT panel to Courier New which I did not have installed and apparently it doesn't have an effective fallback mechanism.

Try changing the font in preferences->general options->fonts->python and opentype editors.

If you're seeing the same problem which I remember, it's possible that your compilation problems are the result of some inadvertent editing (a carriage return in the wrong spot, perhaps) which occurred while the spacing was screwy.

André

ahleman7 May 2012#

André

I played around with those preferences and FontLab seems to be working normally again. Thank you so much! It's an enormous relief.

AHL

Thomas Phinney10 May 2012#

Thanks, André! I actually had the same problem. I haven't found it completely debilitating, but certainly quite irksome.

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