I have just installed FontCreator 10.1, and I am unable to save an existing project for my very large BabelStone Han font (43,542 glyphs) – after about 30 seconds I get an “Out of memory” error. I never had a problem with 10.0 or earlier versions.
Andrew
I’m very sorry about the inconvenience.
We have made several changes to the way we store outlines in font project files. Even though we did test with large files, it looks like your font is bigger or more complex.
Could you send the project file to me, or make it available for download? we’ll only use it for testing purposes.
Thanks for the quick response. I have sent a link to the project file to customersupport.
Andrew
Got it.
I’ll get back to you as soon as we have located the problem and hopefully can provide a solution as well.
So we’ve looked into this issue and can see the font is really huge. In most cases it isn’t a problem, but FontCreator will need 700MB to open and use the font. On saving the font as project, it requires an additional 500MB which might be too much if you have opened several fonts. We were able to save the project file, so can you let us know if you can open and save the font project if it is the only font open in FontCreator?
Earlier versions of FontCreator used less memory for saving font projects, because font outlines were stored in a different manner.
I closed all other applications, and I was able to save the project after two attempts. Another issue is the progress bar goes straight to full when you hit Save, and stays at full until the save has completed. At present 10.1 offers no advantage over 10.0 for me, so I will stay with 10.0.
Andrew
Later I made some changes to the project, and when I tried to save the project I got the “Out of memory” error message again. FontCreator was the only application running, and I only had the one project open. My computer is a new laptop with plenty of memory, and when I looked at task manager Font Creator was only using 40% of memory (900+MB) at most when trying to save. I hope you are able to provide a fix for this issue or I will not be able to use FontCreator if you add useful new features in the future.
We’ve released a maintenance release just a minute ago which has several improvements.
The amount of memory required to open and save a font has been reduced by more than 10% that should make a difference, so please update to the latest version (select Check for Updates) from the Help menu) and let us know your results.
The new release seems better, and I have not yet seen the “Out of memory” error after doing half an hour of editing and saving several times. However, the progress bar still goes straight to full, and remains at full for about 30 seconds whilst the project is saved.
Additionally, the forward and backward buttons do not work as they did in 10.0 – now when I search for a character and open the glyph edit window both arrows are disabled when they used to allow you to move to adjacent characters (which I often want to do).
I also have to say that I really hate the huge bubble-like point markers. I much prefer the small point markers in earlier versions of FontCreator. I did not think the big markers in 10.0 were an improvement, and find these even more distracting and intrusive. Can you add an option to use small markers?
Andrew
Do give it some time. You may grow to like them. The large green nodes give useful feedback if the curve is smooth.
That is great!
Well, estimating which parts of the save related tasks takes most time is a big guess, and in this case it is clearly plain wrong. I’ll see if we can improve it, but it might break it for more common fonts.
I think it would be best if we’d implement another search method: search inside the current selected category, while keeping the category active.
People with high res screens do complain about the tiny markers. I’ll see if we can add an option, to choose between small and large ones.
FontCreator 10.1 already comes with numerous enhancements 
In case you haven’t noticed it, the improved validation features do work a lot better. Take a look at the glyphs: 1107, 1867, 2895, 8827, 31245. Take a look at them in both FC10.0 and FC10.1. The contour direction detection is very accurate.
I have always thought that the “Find” command would be better if it just located the searched glyph in the glyph list without filtering it at all. However, there are situations where filtering the list is useful, e.g. if I want to edit all glyphs with ogonek. Perhaps a checkbox on the Find dialogue could switch modes?
If the “Used By” dialogue would open a filtered list of glyphs, instead of allowing users to select only one composite glyph, that would be much more useful too.
Yes, I found it impossible to correctly validate the contour direction of this and a couple of hundred similar characters with 10.0, and I will certainly revalidate using 10.1.
I also miss the old find function (which I had with v. 5.6 I think), as there are often times when I want to look at a character in the context of its surrounding characters and not just by itself. In v. 10 the left and right arrows at least let me browse to the surrounding characters, but with 10.1 if I find character A, in order to look at the character next to it I have to do a new search. For me this is a backwards step.
We need to partly redesign the Find dialog, so this will take some time.
I think the default could be searching inside the current category. Another option would be how it works right now, add all GLOBAL matches into the Search category. Maybe we could add that as an options:
Search in current category, or search global (font wide)
All suggestions are welcome.
I do not think that searching within the current category would be useful unless it is a large category as in CJK fonts. Even with 256 glyphs one can usually find without searching if it is within the currently viewed list. Users would be misled if not finding a glyph that does exist in the font. A glyph may not appear in the selected category if it has no mapping. I think the best method would be to do a global search and have a checkbox to filter the results to show only the glyphs found, no matter in which category they are found.
The results are currently a new temporary category, through which one can scroll. The glyphs, one.sups, two.sups, three.sups are unmapped and do not appear in the superscript and subscripts category, but they are found in a search, while onesuperior, twosuperior, and threesuperior are not found.
However, if the “Filter Results” checkbox were not shown the matching glyphs would be selected in the glyph overview.
Everything seemed to be working OK yesterday, but this evening when I opened FontCreator 10.1, every time I tried to open a project FontCreator crashed. It crashed every single time I tried to open either a new 10.1 project or an old 10.0 project or a ttf file, and also when I tried to create a new font project. I have rebooted my computer, and run FontCreator with no other applications running, but it still crashes every time I try to open a file. At the same time, I have no problem with opening projects with 10.0. I will try reinstalling 10.1, but am reporting it on the forum in case anyone else is encountering the same problem.
Can you please send me one such project file?
So if one searches this way, we also need to switch to the “Glyphs” category, to ensure all glyphs that are found, can actually be selected.
F3 is currently used to Show/Hide the Glyph Properties. That should be changed, as it is best to use F3 and Shift F3 to search forward and backward.
Search also works in the Glyph Edit window, but there it always searches Global. I think that is fine for now, so I don’t intend to change that behaviour.