I am trying to troubleshoot a computer (Mac OS X 10.4) with all the
patches that is crashing in PowerPoint several times a day. The
program simply closes without any dialog box.
The system log shows the same error each time:
ATSFontActivateFromMemory failed
I'd appreciate any suggestions or advice. I have replaced preferences.
Hello,
We've had similar problems over the last couple of months. Mostly (but
not exclusively) on our Intel Macs. When Intel Macs first came out
there were major problems with crashes being caused by some annoyance
related to the ATS bit of OS X (which is somehow linked to font
handling I think) -
what appears to happen is that an office app (in our case, Word or PPT)
takes offense at something font related and annoys the ATS System which
appears then to go bonkers and use up all the application memory
killing other apps as it goes. Usually a restart is needed to fix it.
It caused us major grief when the Macbook Pro came out, and we raised
it here as an issue (and elsewhere). From the response found, it
seemed that MS blamed Apple (as ATS is apple's bit), Apple blamed MS
(as MS doesn't use ATS services in way Apple would like or some such).
In the end it took upgrades from Apple and MS to make problem go away -
but it has since returned (at least on our systems) in much the same
way.
We were hopefully waiting for Office 2008 (which apparently is better
written, being a proper OS X cocoa / UB app etc.) to come along an
obviate the problem, but now that's been delayed we're once again
looking closely at NeoOffice and the new apple iWork 08 apps as
alternatives to office (we don't use Entourage, so we only need to
replace Word / PPT / XL).
It is a major issue for us - we've identified several work-arounds, but
no solutions. Some days our machines crash several times - some
documents remain effectively un-openable. Things that might work are:
* Remove 'non-standard' OpenType fonts (i.e. ones not shipped with
Office it seems). If you don't want to change fonts, editing and
saving even if Fonts are not present does not affect font assignment so
they reappear on machines with right fonts installed
* Use something like FontExplorer or TCC to clear the system and / or
application font caches
* Open document in NeoOffice - we've not had any such problems using
the app - but it is not perfect at importing / exporting MS formats
