I have uninstalled and reinstalled CorelDraw 2021 on my new iMac. It is up to date. Still, if I try to select a font by using the font dropdown menu, it totally locks up and I have to force quit the app. In fact, I don't even have to click on a font for it to happen. If I click on the slider to make the fonts appear larger, it locks up and I get the continuous spinning color wheel.
Needless to say, this makes CorelDraw pretty much worthless without being able to work with different fonts. I'm hoping someone here will have a solution.
Thanks!
Can I assume the MAC version has Corel Font Manager?
First trouble-shooting step: make sure your graphics board drivers are up to date as well as OSX.The font handling in CorelDRAW is a giant resource hog. There are some steps you can use to make it work a little better. The first thing I do is turn off the Font Preview that shows an example of the selected typeface at the bottom of the drop-down menu. If that doesn't improve performance enough go into Font Options and un-check "use font to display font name" so font names in the menu will be plain text. The item of selected text on the art board will still show what ever typeface is selected. It sort of stinks to have font names displayed just in plain text, but the menu will scroll much faster. If you know your fonts really well you'll already know how they look without needing to see a preview.
Another tip regarding Corel Font Manager: start out with SMALL collections of fonts and then build up from there. If you have CFM referencing 10000 or so font files just as you're getting going font menu performance will bog down badly.
Quality of typefaces also matters greatly. Badly authored fonts will degrade CFM performance. Good quality commercial fonts perform better.
Beware of using complex symbol or picture fonts. Those deteriorate CFM performance to a very terrible degree. I have very few of those loaded. A common one like ITC Zapf Dingbats is no problem. Some symbol/picture fonts are miniature clip art libraries pretending to be font files. They are a giant stumbling block for CFM. There is a good chance your copy of CorelDRAW is trying to render one or more of those fonts when you bring down the font menu causing the system lock-up.
CorelDRAW can struggle with OpenType Variable Fonts. A new release like Helvetica Now Variable is not too bad on well spec'ed, new hardware. An old PC running CorelDRAW 2021 will get brought to its knees when selecting that typeface. Meanwhile the same fonts work just fine over in Illustrator! That's a legit dig at the code in CorelDRAW. There is a lot of junk that badly needs to be cleaned up. The question is whether the higher ups at KKR will devote the resources needed to let Corel accomplish that.
So it seems the MAC version has the exact same issues as the PC version. I can confirm that cleaning up the fonts makes CGM run fine.