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Parody
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Old November 15th, 2016, 10:17 PM
So a question: is the memory usage dependent on the number of fonts installed or the number Realm Works can use?

I ask because I got the warning, but the majority of my fonts are Type 1 or OTF with Type 1 outlines, which Realm Works can't use anyway.

(Yes, I already checked "Don't show this again". :)


Last edited by Parody; November 15th, 2016 at 11:05 PM.
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Viking2054
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Old November 15th, 2016, 11:23 PM
What about those of us that do some desktop publishing and sometimes use a lot of fonts?

Any chance we can get Realm Works to limit the number of fonts it loads? A handful each of serif and san serif fonts should be more then enough. Just allow the user to select the ones they want Realm Works to load...
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rob
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Old November 16th, 2016, 12:00 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Parody View Post
So a question: is the memory usage dependent on the number of fonts installed or the number Realm Works can use?
I believe it's based on the number of fonts that can be used. More below...
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rob
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Old November 16th, 2016, 12:12 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Viking2054 View Post
What about those of us that do some desktop publishing and sometimes use a lot of fonts?

Any chance we can get Realm Works to limit the number of fonts it loads? A handful each of serif and san serif fonts should be more then enough. Just allow the user to select the ones they want Realm Works to load...
The Realm Works desktop client is built on a third-party framework (DevExpress). This framework simply loads all the fonts on the user's computer, so we don't have easy control over which fonts are or aren't loaded. We only discovered the font issue a few days ago, so we have only done a cursory investigation into our options at this point, but there was no readily apparent way for us to restrict which fonts are used. If anyone out there knows of a solution for this, we'd be happy to hear about it!

If you use lots of fonts for other purposes, then you'll absolutely want to keep them all. Some users will find that there are numerous fonts they never intentionally installed and have no use for, in which case they can be readily removed. Every user's situation will be different, and it's simply a trade-off between having the fonts versus having more/larger smart images actively loaded concurrently. Each user must make their own assessment, and it's important that users are made aware of this trade-off. That's why we present the warning, if necessary, and leave it to the user to determine how best to proceed.
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Parody
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Old November 16th, 2016, 12:47 AM
I don't know DevExpress, but one thing you could try (if it lets you) is disabling font previews in the font selection combo boxes. The hope is that they then delay loading each font until it's actually used and just rely on the list of names provided by the system for selecting fonts. If most of us are using the defaults then Realm Works would only need the Tahoma variants, cutting potentially hundreds of loaded fonts down to four.

Edit: Actually two; Tahoma doesn't come with italics.


Last edited by Parody; November 19th, 2016 at 03:54 AM. Reason: Italics...
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BoomerET
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Old November 16th, 2016, 06:22 AM
There are tools you can use that might help.

http://www.trishtech.com/font-loader/

This will take some work on the users part to work effectively.
(ie, uninstalling current fonts, saving them in a folder someplace, run the program when creating documents/DTP/etc)


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Avi
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Old November 16th, 2016, 07:28 AM
How many Fonts is "too much" or is it by "volume"?
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Topdecker
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Old November 16th, 2016, 07:59 AM
Maybe a better approach would be to check in task manager and see how much memory is being used by Realm Works. I got the warning, but the actual consumed memory was 131mb or so, which did not seem especially large. I suspect that the message is generated by count of fonts, not by use of resources.

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Joe
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Old November 16th, 2016, 01:14 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Topdecker View Post
Maybe a better approach would be to check in task manager and see how much memory is being used by Realm Works. I got the warning, but the actual consumed memory was 131mb or so, which did not seem especially large. I suspect that the message is generated by count of fonts, not by use of resources.

Top
Unfortunately its a bit more complicated than that. Task Manager doesn't show the complete picture of resource utilization. You can get a more complete view of things using a tool called "ProcessExplorer" if you're interested. On my system, Realm Works shows as using 133 MB in task manager, but Process Explorer reports the total virtual memory size as 1.3 GB.

Realm Works is a 32 bit application, so it cannot go above 2 GB of virtual memory. That is the ceiling being hit when the out of memory errors occur. We trigger the warning based on the virtual memory size, which is more directly related to the error occurring. It is not based on a simple count of the number of fonts. I think we trigger it above 1.2 GB, but I could be wrong on the exact number.

Hopefully I have not totally misled on any of the technical details. If so, Rob or David will need to correct me.
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rob
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Old November 16th, 2016, 02:57 PM
Joe summed things up nicely.

To specifically answer the question from @Avi, Realm Works looks at the total memory utilization, wherein all the fonts can make a huge difference from one user to the next. Some fonts are much larger than others, so that's also a point of consideration. And the actual memory used by a particular font once loaded for use is typically larger than the size of that font on disk. However, the relative sizes of the fonts on disk seem to generally map to their memory footprint (i.e. larger fonts on disk use more memory once loaded).

Hope this helps!
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