Really weird, dangerous glitch?

Glyphs
1

I’m not sure how to explain this as it’s quite an interesting issue. I’ve spent the past 3 days on the phone with Apple Support because I had thought I installed a virus on my computer. After whipping my hard drive clean, reseting everything, and following every other step they recommended nothing seemed to work.

After a ton of back and forth, I seemed to have narrowed the issue down to a font experiment that I was working on, it’s not a heavy file by any means, but as soon as I install it on my computer it literally breaks everything. I can’t use finder, safari, my dock, the top menu bar, nothing works. It essentially turns my computer into a paper weight. I’ve also installed other fonts (that I’ve made + others found online) and I’ve not been able to recreate it with any other font.

I narrowed it down to this .ttf file (FlipbookV1-FlipbookVARVF.ttf) because I had completely whipped my computer, and only installed that one font, and as soon as I clicked ‘install’ on Font Book the same exact glitch happened.

I’ve attached a google drive link to the ttf/glyphs file, but please be careful. If you do not have backups DO NOT install the otf. I have no clue how this is happening, or if it is even a problem with Glyphs. Apple Support recommended I contact you as they are running out of ideas.

[Click here to view files. Be careful!] (Glitched Font – Google Drive)

I know this is a weird issue, if you’d like to hop on a Zoom call I can probably explain it better face to face.

2

Just a guess:

  1. Font Book is involved in the installation, and
  2. The .glyphs file and the .ttf font only has two characters in it, and
  3. There is a phantom Instance with no settings.
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3

Can you drop it like it’s hot onto Fontbakery.com? That might shed some light on what’s wrong with the file.

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5

Fair enough, it was a very fast exploration just to test some stuff. Could this really cause all the issues I was having though?

6

Here ya go!
fontbakery-report.html.zip (36.8 KB)

7

@Schriër — Not sure if those three things would be the cause. They were just the three things that caught my attention.

9

Interesting, have you seen something like this before?

10

No. I have never used Font Book for anything, and maybe it is possible a font could have only one or two characters. The phantom Instance might be the problem but a dev from Glyphs would have to answer that one.

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11

Thanks for the insight George, out of curiosity which font library software do you use? Maybe I’ll switch over.

12

I have always used Suitcase.

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13

Thanks, I’ll take a look. Is it possible for you to tag a Glyphs dev here? I’m curious if there’s more going on.

14

I’ll have a look in a bit.

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15

Thanks Georg!

16

I had a first look at the file. It doesn’t seem to be totally broken as Safari and FireFox can handle it. I can try in a virtual machine later today. What version of MacOS do you have?

Please check the vertical metrics in the master settings. the overshot and Cap height is zero in some masters.

And the Variable font settings should be called “Regular”, You need another Family Name property to change it.

But both issues should not cause a system hang.

17

That’s what was confusing me, I know it was a messy file, I just wanted to see the variable function quickly before fixing up.

Currently on Sonoma 14.4.1 but it also happened on my other computer which was on Ventura, not sure which version.

Let me know if you end up trying it on a virtual machine, curious if you can recreate the same thing that happened to me.