Word 2004 + Macintel + Some Adobe OpenType Fonts = Crash on save

[Gavin Lawrie]

This has been appearing in several posts recently. We've had this
problem on our intel iMac and MacBook Pro computers. Have done fairly
extensive screening tests. This is what we have found so far.

1) OS X 10.4.6 + Office 2004 11.2.3 + Adobe OpenType fonts on PPC macs
works fine.
2) Same set up (identical - we reinstalled our MacBook Pro and did a
'user migrate' from a G5 2.3 Dual) on intelMac works fine on all apps
(e.g. Powerpoint) when OpenType fonts are used.
3) Open some Word documents using either of two Adobe OpenType fonts
(Helvetica Neue LT and Minion Pro) and Word works fine until you try
and save file. Then, just after you have done any 'do you want to
overwrite' stuff, and with the progress bar about 5% of way along, you
get beach ball of death. At this point you can ForceQuit Word - but
Font handling messed up if you restart without a log-out. If you leave
it, Word will trigger a cascade crash of all running apps, and then
throw you out to log-in screen.
4) Restart the computer, remove the Adobe OpenType fonts from font
folder and try again. Word doc using fonts appears with substituted
fonts, but you can save it OK.
5) Put fonts back, try again, and you get the crash.

First thing we did was to check to see if fonts damaged. They are not
(and they work fine in other Office Apps also, and without problem on
PPC macs).

To check out other possible causes, we've tried reinstalling Office
(back to 11.0), and reinstalling OS X (back to 10.4.5), and both
together. Behaviour seems consistent in all of these cases.

Others have reported that replacing OpenType versions of fonts with TTF
version solves problem (e.g. ITC Garamond problem reported recently).
We are currently trying to source TTF equivalents of our OpenType fonts
to test this.

Only thing that we are not sure about is why some (old) versions of
documents that use some of the OpenType fonts do appear to work in Word
- as in, you can save them on MacIntel machines. Initially we thought
this indicated that some of our MacIntels had the problem and others
not, but rather it seems they all behave similarly. When we get time
we'll try a test where we see if we can isolate if it is one specific
font file that is causing problem.

Either way this should not be happening, and so this looks like a
genuine bug in Word 2004 when it is run on MacIntel hardware. Would be
grateful if either someone MVP ish could report this to whomsoever can
fix it, or post details of how I can do this. Also would be very
helpful to find out if others can reproduce this problem.

Thanks for whatever help is available on this.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Gavin:

Thanks for the exhaustive and detailed analysis. I have forwarded that on
to our internal contact at Microsoft.

If there is any information coming back as a result, it will probably be
posted directly in this forum by the Word developers.

Cheers

This has been appearing in several posts recently. We've had this
problem on our intel iMac and MacBook Pro computers. Have done fairly
extensive screening tests. This is what we have found so far.

1) OS X 10.4.6 + Office 2004 11.2.3 + Adobe OpenType fonts on PPC macs
works fine.
2) Same set up (identical - we reinstalled our MacBook Pro and did a
'user migrate' from a G5 2.3 Dual) on intelMac works fine on all apps
(e.g. Powerpoint) when OpenType fonts are used.
3) Open some Word documents using either of two Adobe OpenType fonts
(Helvetica Neue LT and Minion Pro) and Word works fine until you try
and save file. Then, just after you have done any 'do you want to
overwrite' stuff, and with the progress bar about 5% of way along, you
get beach ball of death. At this point you can ForceQuit Word - but
Font handling messed up if you restart without a log-out. If you leave
it, Word will trigger a cascade crash of all running apps, and then
throw you out to log-in screen.
4) Restart the computer, remove the Adobe OpenType fonts from font
folder and try again. Word doc using fonts appears with substituted
fonts, but you can save it OK.
5) Put fonts back, try again, and you get the crash.

First thing we did was to check to see if fonts damaged. They are not
(and they work fine in other Office Apps also, and without problem on
PPC macs).

To check out other possible causes, we've tried reinstalling Office
(back to 11.0), and reinstalling OS X (back to 10.4.5), and both
together. Behaviour seems consistent in all of these cases.

Others have reported that replacing OpenType versions of fonts with TTF
version solves problem (e.g. ITC Garamond problem reported recently).
We are currently trying to source TTF equivalents of our OpenType fonts
to test this.

Only thing that we are not sure about is why some (old) versions of
documents that use some of the OpenType fonts do appear to work in Word
- as in, you can save them on MacIntel machines. Initially we thought
this indicated that some of our MacIntels had the problem and others
not, but rather it seems they all behave similarly. When we get time
we'll try a test where we see if we can isolate if it is one specific
font file that is causing problem.

Either way this should not be happening, and so this looks like a
genuine bug in Word 2004 when it is run on MacIntel hardware. Would be
grateful if either someone MVP ish could report this to whomsoever can
fix it, or post details of how I can do this. Also would be very
helpful to find out if others can reproduce this problem.

Thanks for whatever help is available on this.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[hdjong]

In my earlier thread (Word crashes on Intel Mac and font ITC Garamond
light.) 3 of may, I explaned how word crashes on save with a new blanc
documents when more than 1464 characters are typed using a Postscript
font or Opentype-postscript font.
But I discovered how this can be avoided with new created documents on
an Intel Mac.

Create new blanc document
Choose Postscipt or Opentype-postscript font
Type less than 1464 characters,
Go to, File menu, properties, Summary tab, Title
You see a very long title. (the same text you typed). When you
replace this text with a short title, you can save the document and
after that you can type as many characters and saving the document
without crashing in quit.

A bit cryptic but it maybe it can help with the problem solving.

Hans de Jong
Netherlands

 

[Gavin Lawrie]

Create new blanc document
Choose Postscipt or Opentype-postscript font
Type less than 1464 characters,
Go to, File menu, properties, Summary tab, Title
You see a very long title. (the same text you typed). When you
replace this text with a short title, you can save the document and
after that you can type as many characters and saving the document
without crashing in quit.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Doesn't work same way here.

Created a blank document and pasted in 3,849 chars (of lorem ipsum
text). Saved with short properties title, using one of our OpenType
fonts. Saved with no problems.

Tried again and attempted to put as many chars as possible into the
Properties / Title field but only persuaded Word to accept 219. File
still saves OK.

Tried again with 1496 characters (no punctuation and no spaces). No problems.

However, created a new document from a template that incorporates our
OpenType fonts. Generate 1001 characters of text. Check properties
and title is simply "Project Title" (as this inherited from Template
rather than initial text). File-Save-As and we get beach ball of
death, cascade application crashes, and chucked out to log-in screen as
before.

Do same thing on our G5 Dual, no problems at all.

I still need to find time to decompose our template to see if I can
isolate if there is a specific element that causes the problem.

G.

 

[Clive Huggan]

Amazing, Hans! Thank you very much for posting back with this info.

Cheers,
Clive Huggan
============

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Hans:

Yes, that helps ME a lot. I put in a bug a couple of months ago reporting
very similar strange behaviour after getting a document from one of the
posters on this newsgroup.

I don't think anyone at Microsoft believed me Now they have your
example as well (plus Gavin's excellent analysis from yesterday) and Jeffrey
just told us he has someone looking at it.

Jeffrey is the Microsoft software tester who helps us out in here. If they
can find anything useful, I expect they'll post it in here.

Cheers

In my earlier thread (Word crashes on Intel Mac and font ITC Garamond
light.) 3 of may, I explaned how word crashes on save with a new blanc
documents when more than 1464 characters are typed using a Postscript
font or Opentype-postscript font.
But I discovered how this can be avoided with new created documents on
an Intel Mac.

Create new blanc document
Choose Postscipt or Opentype-postscript font
Type less than 1464 characters,
Go to, File menu, properties, Summary tab, Title
You see a very long title. (the same text you typed). When you
replace this text with a short title, you can save the document and
after that you can type as many characters and saving the document
without crashing in quit.

A bit cryptic but it maybe it can help with the problem solving.

Hans de Jong
Netherlands

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Kelly Uehling]

Gavin, Hans & John,
I just wanted to throw my "Me too" into this thread and say Kudos for an
excellent description of this particular problem.

One of our Marketing staff recently received a new MacBook Pro and she
began experiencing this issue. We in IT couldn't find an explanation
until I happened to stumble across this thread.

It wasn't clear to me how to work around this issue though. I asked the
end user to change the font from ITC Garamond Light to Arial and she let
me know that she was able to successfully save the document that had
routinely crashed her computer. We did not need to remove the Garamond
font.

Thanks again!
Kelly Uehling

 

[Clive Huggan]

Thanks for the feedback, Kelly!

Clive Huggan
============

 

[Gavin Lawrie]

Just a short update on this. We have not yet had time to work out
exactly what or how this is happening, but it seems that opening a PPT
with a Word table embedded where the word table uses the problem fonts
causes a beach-ball-of-death crash of PPT. One of our team on the road
with a MacPro, was mailed the ppt presentation (which was saved in
thumbnail view), opened doc and after showing about 10 of the
thumbnails went BBOD. He's just returned and doc opens fine on PPC
(indeed it was created on such a machine), so seems to be MacIntel
related.

Major unexplained difference is why this one is showing up when you
view the file - with Word you can usually view the file, the crash
comes when you save...

Anyhow, when we get time we'll try and deconstruct problem a bit
better. Until then, please post if you have seen anything similar.

Thanks!

Gavin Lawrie

 

[Gavin Lawrie]

This has been appearing in several posts recently. We've had this
problem on our intel iMac and MacBook Pro computers. Have done fairly
extensive screening tests. This is what we have found so far.

When we get time we'll try a test where we see if we can isolate if it
is one specific font file that is causing problem.

I've spent the day trying to get to the bottom of this problem. What
has emerged is consistent with what we found before, and has some
similarities with the findings posted by Hans de Jong.

First, we found a class of documents that use our OpenType font set but
don't crash MacIntel's. The common feature appeared to be the length
of the document. We found a pair of documents, one of which reliably
crashed the macintels on save-as, another almost identical that didn't.
Further, by moving material back and forth between these two
documents, and some other games, I then established that the problem is
not linked to any one specific OpenType font we use.

Second, I created a blank document and filled it with random text. I
gradually increased the amount of text in the document, and sure enough
when the document went beyond a certain size, a Save As... operation
would reliably crash the MacIntel. Shorten the document, or remove the
OpenType fonts being used, and the document could be saved as...
without problem.

Third I checked that the file has no problems at all on the similarly
configured G5 Dual.

The numbers for document size that triggers the crash are, however,
different to those obtained by Hans de Jong. Also, as posted before,
we can't replicate his 'very long title' problem - we get a crash
regardless of length of document title. Changing the title doesn't fix
the problem for us, as Hans said it did for him.

Our test document has the following attributes:

Pages 1. Words 241. Characters 1540 / 1768. Paragraphs 20. Lines 38.

The crashing version of the document has additional characters
appended, and has these attributes:

Pages 1. Words 241. Characters 1543 / 1771. Paragraphs 20. Lines 38.

In both cases the title of the document (in Properties / Summary) is
simply 'Title'.

My guess is that some other variable is the thing that takes the file
over the crash limit - it is just affected by things like word count /
character count rather than being directly driven by it.

We only have Adobe OpenType fonts: we've not been able to work out if
the problem persists with non Adobe fonts. Would be very helpful if
someone could let us know if problem appears with OpenType fonts from
other foundries.

Hopefully someone can work out what is going on with this information.
If anyone wants a copy of the test document, let me know and I'll post
it somewhere.

I had a look, and replacing our OpenType fonts with PS equivalents
(which it seems we can do) will cost about $500. Seems like a lot
simply to use Word 2004... I'd much rather someone worked out how to
fix it...

Gavin Lawrie
UK

 

[Beth Rosengard]

This is great information, Gavin. Please continue to pass along any new
discoveries or insights and we'll do the same!

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/Mac/WordMacHome.html>

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

As soon as you start having problems with stuff going between Word and
PowerPoint, I leap in to note that whereas PowerPoint can rotate text, and
Excel can rotate it "in units of 90 degrees", Word cannot rotate text at all
(unless it's in a text box or a table).

So as soon as I hear this problem, I say: check your document for rotated
text: chances are that's where the problem is.

Cheers

Just a short update on this. We have not yet had time to work out
exactly what or how this is happening, but it seems that opening a PPT
with a Word table embedded where the word table uses the problem fonts
causes a beach-ball-of-death crash of PPT. One of our team on the road
with a MacPro, was mailed the ppt presentation (which was saved in
thumbnail view), opened doc and after showing about 10 of the
thumbnails went BBOD. He's just returned and doc opens fine on PPC
(indeed it was created on such a machine), so seems to be MacIntel
related.

Major unexplained difference is why this one is showing up when you
view the file - with Word you can usually view the file, the crash
comes when you save...

Anyhow, when we get time we'll try and deconstruct problem a bit
better. Until then, please post if you have seen anything similar.

Thanks!

Gavin Lawrie

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Gavin Lawrie]

So as soon as I hear this problem, I say: check your document for rotated
text: chances are that's where the problem is.

Hi John,

I would agree with you, except for fact that problem does not present
on PPC based mac. If it was a text rotation problem, we'd see it on
any type of Mac. This only occurs on the MacBook Pro - the problem
arose when someone prepared a presentation on our G5 Dual, and mailed
it to the person to present from their MacBook Pro: worked fine on
sending (and on subsequent sending back). Crashes the MacBook Pro. So
looks like something else is going on.

Regards

Gavin Lawrie.

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hey Gavin,

Wow, thank you very much for this very, very detailed analysis of the
problem. I've passed this onto other testers in the Macintosh Business Unit,
who will study the results Hans de Jong and you have posted to this
Newsgroup.

Thanks

Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Gavin:

Different graphics driver + rotated text? I'm still suspicious

Cheers

Hi John,

I would agree with you, except for fact that problem does not present
on PPC based mac. If it was a text rotation problem, we'd see it on
any type of Mac. This only occurs on the MacBook Pro - the problem
arose when someone prepared a presentation on our G5 Dual, and mailed
it to the person to present from their MacBook Pro: worked fine on
sending (and on subsequent sending back). Crashes the MacBook Pro. So
looks like something else is going on.

Regards

Gavin Lawrie.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[adam.bolt]

Hi All, I'm having the same problem! It's great to find a thread about
this and know that I'm not crazy. I couldn't find any information
online when I first had the problem back in February, and a call to
Apple was completely unhelpful. They just blamed it on the font
manufacturer. I initially had the problem with the Postscript font DIN.
I subsequently duplicated the problem with other Postscript fonts. My
company actually purchased the OpenType version of DIN hoping it would
resolve the problem (as Word didn't seem to have problems with several
free OpenType fonts we tested). Well, it turns out we have the same
problem with the OpenType version of DIN; it does show up as type
OpenType-Postscript in Font Book, like the other fonts mentioned on
this thread. What's a little strange is the problem occurs with
DIN-Light but not with DIN-Regular, or at least it doesn't seem to.
Also, when I first had the problem several months ago, I found like
other posters that some documents had the problem and others didn't. I
thought I had narrowed it down to only documents with embedded images.
But reading in this thread that others have found a connection between
the number of characters and Word freezing on Save, I'm thinking maybe
it has to do with the actual size of the Word doc (i.e. in kilobytes).
That would also explain why the number of characters required to
trigger this issues seems to be inconsistent for different users.
Anyway, those are my two cents. I look forward to some sort of
resolution to this issue, as it's causing us some pretty serious
problems; basically every document we produce in our business uses the
DIN font.

Thanks to everyone for this thread and all the helpful suggestions!

Best,
Adam

 

[Gavin Lawrie]

Mystifying news from the front line...

Waiting for MS to fix the problem (or Apple etc.) is not an option for
us. In theory we can edit the documents with no fonts installed, but
printing them is a bit of a problem. So we've shelled out for a
sub-set of our fonts in Mac PS format to see if this might solve the
problem. Fortunately we only bought a sub-set - we bought the Mac PS
version of Minion Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic from Linotype.
We used the Linotype font utility FontExplorer X (1.0.1) to install
these fonts. We removed all other Minion fonts from the computer
(physical deletion method), and flushed both application and system
font caches (using Linotype utility).

Then the following steps / results happened. I have no explanation for
what happens - hopefully someone can advise / suggest where to go next
with this.

1. First I confirmed that de-activating the Minion fonts worked in same
fashion to removing fonts from font folder. I deactivated Minion,
loaded the test 'crashing' document and tried to do save-as. It saved
just fine.
2. I closed Word. Activated Minion. Opened and saved-as the 'broken'
document. Save-as worked fine.
3. I edited all the 'available styles' in the broken document that used
Minion Pro, changing to the equivalent Minion font. Then I tried to
Save As... the file. I got the same cascade-crash from Word that we've
seen previously and reported on before. Force-quit and restart
computer.
4. I deactivate Minion. Flush system and application font caches. Restart.
5. Open 'broken' document and confirm save-as works OK. It does.
6. I edited styles in broken document, changing styles using Minion Pro
to use Optima (a TrueType font, used simply because it was there)
instead. Then tried to Save As... the file. Save As... works fine.
7. Close Word. Activate Minion. Edit the saved 'Optima' document -
changing styles using Optima to use Minion instead. Try Save As... and
get the cascade crash.
8. Aaaaagh!
9. Reflect on the waste of €120 on PS fonts. Scream again.
10. Wonder what to do next. So step through steps listed above again.
Get exactly same results second time round.

Test computer is an early model MacBook Pro 2.0 with 2.0GB Ram running
10.4.6, Office 2004 (11.2.3), Acrobat Pro 7 and some other apps
installed (e.g. Skpe, Fire etc.). During tests, only Word is open.

So in summary, what do we know now?

1. Under some circumstances documents that work fine on PPC machines
cause Word 2004 to crash during Save As... operations on MacIntel
machines.
2. Removing OpenType fonts used in the document from the font folder
(or equivalent) stops document crashing word when run on MacIntel
hardware.
3. Installing similarly named PS fonts (but not using them) on machine
where OpenType fonts have been removed does not cause crash on Save
As...
4. Editing document to use the substitute PS fonts (Minion rather than
Minion Pro) causes Save As... crash to reappear
5. Editing document to use some other font (Optima rather than Minion
Pro) does not cause Save As... crash
6. Problems are narrowly linked to Word - PowerPoint 2004 (for example)
has no problems using the OpenType fonts.

Help! I really can't think what to do next. Any suggestions would be
really most helpful. Separately, I have confirmed that opening
document using NeoOffice J's Word equivalent seems to work just fine
with OpenType fonts activated: but for various reasons we really are
not keen on running NeoOffice on some machines and Word 2004 on others.

Look forward to hearing suggestions.

Gavin Lawrie

 

[adam.bolt]

That's funny Gavin, I did the same thing as you but in reverse. I had
thought that it was Postscript fonts that were causing the cascading
crash, so my company shelled out for the OpenType version of the same
font. I had the same result as you, except in my case Word
automatically substitutes the OpenType version of the font for the
Postscript version, so I don't have to manually edit the document
styles to use the OpenType version. But saving, regardless of whether
the OpenType version of the font or the Postscript version is being
used, causes the cascading crash. I wish I had been as wise as you and
only purchased a subset of the OpenType font. I am also kicking myself
for the waste of $200+.

I have another tidbit of information that might be helpful: I found
that when this cascading crash starts, if I have Activity Monitor open
I can see the ATSServer process (ATS, I believe, stands for Apple Type
Services) repeatedly crashing and relaunching (and the pid increases
each time). I'm wondering if this is what is causing other programs to
crash, that the ATSServer process is taking up more and more memory as
it crashes and relaunches. It also may be a hint to someone more
knowledgeable than myself as to what is causing this.

That's all for now. I'm certainly looking forward to the resolution of
this problem! Thanks for all the helpful information, everyone!

Best,
Adam

 

[hdjong]

Still the same error with the latest Microsoft Office update 10.2.4 :-(

Do we have to wait for the universal binary version?

 

[bog]

Hi. Thanks for posting this info! We're experiencing the same issue. I had
narrowed it down to Word and Intel Macs, but had just started thinking about
the OpenType fonts. I wanted to add that when Word freezes during the save,
the process ATSServer (a Mac OS X service which provides font notifications)
crashes and relaunches continuously until you force quit Word. This constant
crashing sometimes causes other applications such as Finder and Safari to
quit as well. If anyone wants to see any of these crash logs, let me know.

Thanks again,

Mark bog