Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop stops responding when Font Library accessed

Question

I am having an issue with Illustrator & Photoshop when it comes to font time. I can click the font tool and type using the default font, no problem.

As soon as I search for a font or scroll for something different, the program freezes up in to the "Not Responding" wash screen.

I would like help fixing this issue if there is a way of finding the faulty font(s) without having to reset my library. I have a lot of fonts so I am not sure which is the faulty one. I would like to avoid having to re-install them all again one by one as that would take forever. Could you please help me?

I am using the latest Illustrator and Windows 10 Pro.

Answer 1

In general, the best way to find a bad font is....

• disable half the fonts... test.
• If it's still broke... disable half of what's still active... test.
• repeat until things are working.
• Then slowly re-enable a few... test...
• repeat.. until it breaks again.
• Go back and forth like this until you can narrow down which font is the issue
  (Be aware it can be more than one font.)

While there are a few third party apps that say they examine and detect bad fonts, in my experience such tools only find really damaged files - generally files so damaged an app won't even load them. And I don't believe such tools are generally free. Given the amount of times I've needed similar functionality, it's never been worth any cost here. I simply follow the steps above.

Hardware specific trouble-shooting is off topic here. But a general internet search for "How to test for bad fonts [your OS]" will turn up some procedures which may help as well - such as deleting font caches.

Answer 2

Side note: TOO MANY fonts installed at the same time will crash you too. Adobe products do the whole "live preview" thing, and asking it to render so many simultaneously is asking too much.

If you know with certainty none of your fonts are bad, uninstall 90% of them and see if it fixes it. The upper boundary seems to hover around 500. If you have many, many more than that (I've got 90,000+, as a for instance), get a font manager application that will let you install and uninstall them on the fly at need.

Typeface is a fantastic solution for Mac. The Font Thing is a freeware solution for Windows. (Note: I'm not affiliated with either. I used to use The Font Thing to solve this same problem you're having until I switched to Mac. I STILL use Typeface).

Answer 3

Thank you guys for your willingness to assist me. After much digging, I did some more digging, then I dug some more and after I dug a little further I found an answer from Adobe.

So they have a script that you need to add to your Photoshop script folder and it can be accessed from their website with instructions here. They also give you a list of known problematic fonts but needless to say my problem child was not on that list. I hope this helps someone else in the future.

The font that gave me the problem was Heiti SC. I have removed it after running the script and now the font tool is running as smooth as a baby's bottom again.

Good luck guys and keep it creative!