Font corruption, apps crash whenever I use a downloaded font

It's not just the Regular face, it's the entire set of 14 styles. I can type just ff and it's fine. But anything within a word, such as office, and Pages dies.

The SoftMaker Office suite, Affinity Designer 2, Photoshop 2025 and all other third party apps I tested have no trouble using Spectral.

But, any Apple created apps (that I have on my Mac, which is Pages and TextEdit), crash with this font set, and only this font set, on any word containing an ff pair. I think it would be a very safe bet that Keynote and Numbers will also crash with Spectral. It would be interesting to see how far down the line of Apple's titles this would go. Would Final Cut Pro, Logic and others also croak?

Yes, there's a few of them there: ffb, ffh, ffi, ffj, ffk, ffl and fft.

It could be what Pages is balking on. It's ignoring the (example) ff ligature and is waiting for you to finish one of the three character ligatures. Then crashes when the next character you type is not any of them.

It's also hard to say what, or who's at fault here. Only Apple's apps (that I tried) don't like this font set. Third party apps have no problem with the same set. So, you could say something is wrong with Apple's apps.

But that ignores the fact that only this font set is causing the crashing. I tested at least 50 other fonts with Pages and TextEdit in a combination of those included with the OS, and a random sampling of the many third party fonts I have. None of them cause either app to crash.

That points to the Spectral fonts as the problem. Which seems far more likely since it's the only font set I could find that causes the issue.

I tried Spectral regular earlier today. As you noted, any time you type ff, Pages crashes. I couldn't get any other font to do that.

I then opened Spectral regular in FontLab to see what may be causing the problem. Since ff was the only pair causing the crash (as far as I tested), I figured it was a kerning/spacing issue. The f glyph did have several kerning pairs assigned to it, so I just deleted all of them and saved the font out to a new OpenType PostScript font.

No change. Any instance of ff crashed Pages immediately after any following key. I didn't look any further to see what may be the cause. Mostly because there's nothing special about Spectral. It looks like any of a few thousand other seriffed book fonts. Just use something else.

I wasn't sure if it was the "ff" or the "fi". They're both ligatures. Maybe the new text engine gets confused with two of them right next to each other like that.

Also, when I installed the full spread, I got crashes in other apps when changing the style. And sometimes, I would get the crash after typing, but only after a couple of seconds.

bamfpire wrote:

I just removed the font, reset my font book, redownloaded Spectral, and tried to type the word "office" in notes and got the same issue. I got it when trying to type "office" and got it when I typed it in a different font and changed the font.

I tried again. This time I installed all versions of the Spectral font. It's much more crash-happy now.

I'm not sure what else to do

That's easy enough. Remove the Spectral font and don't use it.

Unfortunately, in the modern world, there simply isn't anything you can do in cases like this. If you want, I can give you some internet misinformation.

You can file Apple Feedback

Or you could file an official Bug Report.

But that won't change anything. This font will still cause crashes. Apple is likely going to rewrite the text handling engine again this year. Maybe it won't crash in October. Or perhaps it will crash with more fonts in October. No way to tell.

The only thing you can control here is how you deal with the material world and with internet misinformation. In the material world, use of this font causes a crash, so don't use the font. You can have some fun and play around with filing a bug report. Just remember that this is internet. It's not real. It's not the material world. Don't go signing up for the beta program in hopes that it's going to be fixed one day. Maybe it will. But it probably won't. I assume that you have more important things to do with your Apple device from now until October. Do those. Just don't try to do them using this font.

bamfpire wrote:

Do you mind me asking which variant of the font you were using before? But yeah that's good to know it's not just my computer or something wrong with my programs. I assumed it had something to do with the update as I didn't change or download anything new, but I just wanted to make sure it wasn't anything on my end causing the crashes.

The first time I only installed the "Regular" variant.

It's definitely not anything you're doing wrong. Fonts shouldn't cause apps to crash like that. Apple has been rewriting the font engine the past couple of years. Those rewrites always come with new bugs.

Fonts aren't easy to create. I don't know (and won't take the time) to figure out how the designer managed to create a font set that won't work correctly in all apps.

It is very strange that, as far as I can tell, only Apple's own apps crash with this particular font set. But again, it's just a book font that looks nearly identical to literally thousands of other book fonts. Pick something else.

I wasn't sure if it was the "ff" or the "fi". They're both ligatures. Maybe the new text engine gets confused with two of them right next to each other like that.

That one crossed my mind, too. That Pages was trying to automatically replace the individual ff characters with a ligature. But I forgot to look and see if there even is an ff or fi ligature in the font.

Looking again…

Edit: There are a few others, but these are most of the ligatures in the font:

Still not sure why this font is crashing.

This seems to be a bug in Apple Pages. I can't reproduce the crash in TextEdit or Notes.

From your list of ligatures, it could be "ffi" ligature. I didn't even know you could have 3. Perhaps that's the problem.