InDesign Crashing with particular Google Fonts
- November 5, 2019
- 2 replies
- 1444 views
This applies to both InDesign CC2019 and CC2020.
I’m setting a document which contains a lot of Amharic, and I would really like to use Google’s Noto Sans Ethiopic for this, since it’s the only nice-looking sans-serif Ethiopic font I can find.
Trouble is, using Noto Sans seems to more or less randomly crash InDesign. I haven’t been able to work out exactly what it is that causes the crashing, but here’s what I’ve discovered so far:
- I haven’t seen any crashes using an altogether different font like Ethiopic WashRa
- Sometimes ID crashes immediately when I change a character style to use Noto; other times, it seems to go through all right, but then when I scroll to a specific spread (or even just scroll to its thumbnail in the Pages panel), the crash comes immediately. I’m not sure whether that’s just because I sometimes happen to be on a crash-inducing page when changing the style and other times not
- The crashes don’t happen in all files, only some; others seem to be okay (the files in question are between 3 and 20 pages long)
- I’ve tried with several different variants of Noto (normal, semicondensed; book, normal, semibold, bold), and the crashes seem to happen equally at the same places with all the variants I’ve tried
- I can’t see anything different about the pages that cause the crashes; they just contain auto-flowed text in a primary text frame, continued from and into previous and subsequent spreads. It could be that the crash-inducing pages contain a specific character, but running through an entire document to find a specific character that doesn’t appear except on one page is something I’d prefer not having to do
- Occasionally, a hard reboot has caused ID to suddenly accept the style change and not crash on a file/location where it crashed before rebooting; mostly, though, rebooting has had no effect
Given all this, I’m fairly sure one or more versions of Noto Sans Ethiopic is the culprit, though I don’t know why or how exactly. ID’s crash logs appear to be written in an archaic dialect of gibberish and don’t really tell me much, but I know they make sense to some people, so I’ve attached the most recent one here to perhaps clarify something for smarter people than me.
Short of just giving up on Noto and using a different font (which I’d rather not do, unless someone can point me to an equally nice and preferably free sans-serif Ethiopic font), what are my options here? How can I further troubleshoot this?
{Renamed by MOD}
