Glyphs freezing when zooming in or out with a .pdf file in the background

Glyphs
1

I use Glyphs version 3.5 (3532). I have MacOS up to date to version 27.0 with 16GB of RAM. No plugins are active. I restarted both Glyphs and my computer after disabling them. Plenty of disk space is available for caches and such. There are no other heavy applications that may slow down the system.

I never experienced any problems with the application before, running smoothly always.

Usually, I use .png files for my glyph backgrounds, but today my scanner created a .pdf file, so without noticing I added it into my project as usual. It took me a while to narrow the problem down to that, and can confirm that replacing the .pdf scan with the .png fixes the issue, while adding the .pdf to a file that had no previous issue creates the freezing on zoom. This is not a very high-dpi scan we are talking about, it was a 200KB one-page document.

The issue is easily replicable with the scan across projects, application restarts and using any pdf file that contains an image. The issue is present both on pinching with a touchpad, as well as when using the keyboard shortcuts rapidly to simulate the progressive zoom of the touchpad. The issue is most prevalent when the glyph fills up most, or all of the screen estate.

I would expect either that the application rejects pdf background outright if it cannot handle it, converts it to an image automatically, or does not freeze the application when zooming with the file in the background of a glyph.

Now that I’m aware of the cause it is not a big issue to just make sure to use .png files for the background, but still I hope that this bug report turns out useful and will be fixed at some point in the future.

Kind regards,

Julia Jasieńska

2

Could you send me a sample .glyphs file and that pdf?

3

Since I’m a new user, I’m unable to attach files directly.

This link will work for one month. It’s a minimal reproduction I have created, containing only an “o” glyph from my current project and the sketch pdf in the background, not positioned very nicely. I never shared a Glyph project before, so I’m not sure how it will react to not having the image source at the same location, but you can just remove the background of the “o” glyph and add the .pdf file back. The issue is present immediatly upon opening the glyph window when zooming in to make the letter fill up the screen completely. There is nothing special about this setup in particular though, I was able to replicate it among other projects and .pdf files, as long as the .pdf files contained a raster image, and not just some vector text for instance.

4

thanks for the files. I can reproduce the issue. And I could improve the performance a bit but it seems that the system rendering of the pdf is very slow. working around that is not easily possible right now. So I can only ask for not using pdf …