Pink Poogle Toy Forum

I want to know if fellow GIMPers are having the same problems I have from time to time when working with the program.

First problem: it doesn't seem to like some of the fonts I imported, and when I scroll through my fonts, it gives me one of those black screens of death. I can minimize the screen and keep going, but if I close it, the whole thing shuts down.

Second problem: Does it ever randomly decide to close on you? You're in the middle of something and suddenly everything is gone. You have to reboot the program and either be grateful that it is saved or grumble because that's 1/2 hour of work down the drain.


I don't know if any of these can be fixed, I'm mostly just asking if others suffer with it or if my computer is somehow corrupted.

I used to use gimp and those things happened to me all of the time. :-/ I'm pretty sure that there's really no way around it.

Sometimes. Make sure you have the most recent version of GIMP. (2.2.3) Some of those kind of bugs got fixed.

Based on the problems you've listed, I assume you're using Windows. They've yet to make a truly stable windows port of the program, and at least the last time I looked, they basically wished Windows users luck and said they'd work on it when they had time -- it's very much not a priority for the software. I suppose it's still better than not being able to use it at all, though. If it's any consolation, many people (including some of the developers) are amazed that it runs on Windows at all.

As far as the fonts go, I suggest not leaving them all installed -- get a font manager and keep them in a central folder elsewhere. Adobe Type Manager is good if you have a bit of cash to spend (it's about $70 as I recall), or else in the realm of free products, The Font Thing works pretty well. Just leave the fonts that come with the operating system in, and install and uninstall others as you need them. Most graphics programs don't like large numbers of fonts, and as a general rule of thumb free programs like it even less.

As far as random closing goes, the best I can really suggest is save a lot, and send in a bug report. And, as was suggested, make sure you're using the most current version. In order to have any better guesses as to why it's doing that, I'd need to know more details -- what kind of computer you have, operating system version, processor and memory, other programs running at the same time, other things hooked up to the computer (I'd assume mouse, for example, but wacom tablets often cause problems with gimp), etc.

Thanks for the advice, I'll look into that Font Thing.

I figured there wouldn't be an easy solution to this. It isn't that bad, just frustrating from time to time. I always keep it in perspective by asking myself if I would prefer to shell out the cash for another program, sigh, and re-boot the program.