NWP 1.4.1 crashing in Lion

[dboyk]

Since I've installed Lion, NWP has been crashing on open. At first, I thought it was because of one of the previously-opened files that it was opening, so I deleted all the Preferences and Application Support files in my Library folder (incidentally, why is there no way to force NWP not to open any files on startup?). That didn't fix anything, though. It starts up normally, and after between about 1 and 3 seconds, I get a beach ball and an Application Not Responding, and Activity Monitor reports 95%+ CPU usage. I would try reinstalling, but I can't find a disk image for 1.4.1 (the new features in 2.0 aren't worth $49 to me). I'm including a sample file from Activity Monitor. I tried to Send Feedback, but of course NWP crashed before I was able to. Is there anything I can do, or did Lion somehow break NWP?

[martin]

I'm sorry you've had troubles. The sample you posted indicates that NWP is busy (perhaps completely hung) while generating font previews. Perhaps one of your fonts isn't well behaved on Lion. You might launch Apple's FontBook and validate all your installed fonts.

That said, even if you get NWP 1.4.1 launched, there are a few other issues with running NWP version 1.4.1 on Lion. The only critical one we've found so far is that text in asian scripts (eg: Chinese) can layout as if it didn't have any width (ie: all characters stack/draw on top of one another in a jumble). We have a beta that's compatible with Lion, but it's only for Pro version 2.

Oh, and lastly, reinstalling NWP won't help you here, but we do have a version history archive that supplies downloads of all past versions.

[dboyk]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, after I removed all the problem fonts, the problem persisted. I then erased the Application Support files and it still didn't go away. I'm attaching a new sample file.

[martin]

I think you forgot to attach your new sample...

[dboyk]

Whoops, sorry. Here it is.

[martin]

Thanks for the extra sample. Unfortunately it shows the same problem: hung while loading font previews. To be clear, the sample shows that NWP is asking the system (OSX) to generate a font preview, and that request never returns control back to NWP, which is why I think this is a font/system issue, and not a NWP issue.

I'm attaching a NWP preferences file here that has the font menu previews disabled. If you move it into place (make sure NWP is not running while you do this), you should at least be able to launch NWP. You might still run into problems down the line, if you try to use whatever font has gone wonky. Perhaps you can try all your fonts out once you have NWP launched, in other to ferret out which one is the problem. I was going to write a macro that could aid you in this tedious task, but it turns out macros don't have any way of knowing the full list of available fonts- sorry.

[dboyk]

Hmm, now I get a real crash, not a hang. I'm attaching the crash report.

[martin]

Thanks for the crash report. It's looking like Pro 1.4.1 isn't particularly stable on Lion- we're looking into producing a Pro 1.4.2 that is compatible with Lion. Sorry for the trouble. In the meantime you might use the Pro 2.0.1 beta, even if just in demo mode.