CorelDraw X5 - Networks, Fonts and Font Navigator

Locke
over 13 years ago

Greetings all - I've been looking around the forums and have seen many posts about CorelDraw X5 and the issues it's had with the Bitstream Font Navigator. In that vein I'm opening up a discussion here since I haven't seen too much of networks and domains being thrown in the mix of this issue.

We've been using Corel with Font Navigator on version 12 with the fonts being collected into one shared drive from the server on our network . This allowed multiple users to access the fonts and have CorelDraw's built in panose to find the fonts with the Bitstream Font Navigator (that came with the software).  This has and is working beautifully.

With the introduction of X5 I've been having many delays and lags whenever I've dealt with fonts. I've come to the conclusion that it is because of the Font Navigator 2006 (that came with DrawX5). I tried using the Font Navigator version that came with version 12 with CorelDrawX5 with better results. It doesn't crash but still has lag time when opening/saving and working with typestyles.

Another experiment was to load CorelDraw X5 without the Font Navigator feature at all. It works lightning fast on a fresh install. However I believe that if any Font Navigator was loaded on the system previously it still maintains links that cause issues. To better illustrate I've loaded Draw12 and DrawX5 with Font Navigator features- removed them - then loaded X5 only. There is still lag as opposed to machines that only had a clean X5 install with no font navigator ever loaded.

So, I'm suspecting that there must be another way to completely clear out any traces of the Font Navigator programs (step one). The second step would be to figure out how to make one of these Font Navigator programs work with networking (although there has been alot of posts of moving away from this due to Bitstream Font Navigator being old and unsupported).

What the unknown is how the networking is affecting this issue (if at all)?

Thanks you for any feedback!

  • over 13 years ago
    A lot will depend on the OS you are working with. Are you working with XP or Win7? I understand why you are using a shared set of fonts for everyone but one problem with that is that each system has it’s own font folder in windows also. I work with many fonts on my systems (over 60,000) because of the work that I do. I move these in and out all of the time and FontNav works fine except if you are working with Win7.
     
    Just using your scenario of everyone using the same database for fonts will definitely cause many delays just because of the fact that the network will drop an inactive network connection automatically by itself which will cause many delays when you go to use a font from another system. A method that you might want to try which will increase your speed on all machines is to have a font database on your network drive and the copy the fonts that another system is using to the station that needs it. You will find if the fonts installed on your systems reside there they will run a lot faster.
     
    One thing that a lot of users do not understand that the FontNav catalog is built on a first come first serve basis while windows wants to load the fonts that are in the windows fonts folder first. When you build a catalog for FontNav what you want to do the first time you start it is DO NOT select your root drive as the program starts out doing. What you want to do is uncheck the root drive and go to the windows fonts folder and select it only. Then build your catalog. Then go to find fonts and select the directory that your fonts are stored and run it again. Then if you want all of the fonts that are installed on your system to be in the catalog, go to the root directory and use that to find the rest of the fonts. This will give you the best running catalog for any system.

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