Adobe Fireworks CS4 Text Engine Problem!
**** update : Adobe has released an update! can be downloaded here: http://www.adobe.com/support/fireworks/downloads_updaters.html ***
**** update : Adobe is currently working on this issue, I hope they can fix it soon! ***
I have been working with the new Fireworks CS4 on a few designs, but I always got this weird text problem.
I know that Adobe Fireworks has a new text engine but it’s really a mess!
Anyone with the same problem? I have read Adobe’s Forum but I don’t think they have the answer.
1. Weird Text Alignment very annoying when moving or editing the text. This problem shows up 100% when editing or making a new design.
Adobe Cs4 Text Problem
2. You can Select the Text but you cannot edit it. (No, the layer is not lock, I can show/hide them and lock or unlock), Although this only happens not too often.
3. Font Anti-alias are ugly.
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Tags: Adobe Fireworks, Fireworks Bugs, Fireworks Text Problem
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November 18th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Yeah man!
This is a BIG issue. I’m corresponding constantly with Adobe Tech Support about the problem. It’s driving them crazy!
Hope this will be fixed ASAP!
BTW: Do you have any free templates/sample files showing how to work with layermasks? I’m used to the ways of Photoshop but I haven’t got the hang of it in FW.
Thanks
/H
November 18th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
yes, they will be updating the text engine soon. I know they are working on it. Arun from Adobe is contacting me about the issue. If you could replicate the Jumping text bug, please do let me know. I don’t know why I can’t replicate it. It just shows out of nowhere!
I first thought that it was my system, since I only have 1GB RAM.. I just upgraded my RAM to 3GB.. and still the same.
It occurs mostly on:
1. On the middle of designing - doesn’t happen when first loading fireworks.
2. After grouping and ungrouping text with other elements like buttons and form fields.
3. After changing and resizing the text.
November 18th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Hi again!
I’ve managed to reproduce the jumping bug!
This is what I’ve done:
1. Created a textbox with a header and afterwards another textbox with some standard text.
2. Duplicated the two textboxes and duplicated the last textbox and changed its appearance.
3. Resized the text (the blue) and moved it with shift+downcursor and then it occured - the textbox shifted and jumped from its original position.
Get the file here:
http://www.yesyes.dk/test_fw4.png
Cheers,
/Henriko
November 18th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
thanks Henriko!
sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.
When duplicating the two text boxes and then moving them is usually done by a series of keyboard shortcuts. (hold shift key to select and ctrl+shift+d to duplicate and shift+arrow to move).
I think that the text engine has a lapse on remembering the last position of the text box and therefore produce the bug. just my observation.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I see the same problem. I cannot consistently recreate it, but it seems to happen most frequently when grouping elements and then moving them. I also see it frequently when copy an element. I am on the verge of going back to CS3 until they can fix this.
December 11th, 2008 at 2:30 am
I have the same problem. In Dreamweaver CS4 selecting and copying code in the code view is also very flaky. I’m about ready to revert to CS3 because CS4 seems to have way more new bugs than improvements.
December 11th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I am also having difficulties with text in FW CS4, every time I try to edit text the program just crashes. It’s driving me insane!
December 16th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Seeing issues with text shifting on the canvas or bounding box going out of sync?
A temporary workaround solution is the below Extension which will correct all such text shifting in a .png document.
Important Note:
1. Running this script once on a document will correct all the text bounding boxes which were shifted, at one go. Please note that this correction is for that session only. You can again come across text shifting issue while working. Recommended usage would be to run this script once on a document when it is opened and where major work related to text is done.
2. Any CS3 text element if present inside a Group will get re-rendered on running this script.
After installing this extension, you can access this script from Commands menu–>Re-sync Text
3. This script will not touch any text elements in the documents having missing fonts.
Thus there is no need to worry about CS3 text and missing text getting re-rendered unnecessarily on using this Extension.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1706527
This extension can be used to re-sync the text elements and their bounding boxes after opening the .png file before starting to work on it. However, while working further, the issue might recur.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:57 am
YES, I also confirm same bug in Adobe Fireworks CS4 JAPANESE Edition too !!
I go back to CS3 …. not good…
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I have the same text problem and Fireworks CS4 is unusable at this point.
I have been using Fireworks CS4 and it is a
BIG DISAPPOINTMENT!
This new release has so many bugs and I can’t believe it was released.
Adobe better get on the ball!
I have been using Fireworks since Version 2 and never encountered this many bugs. Fireworks is a great application and Adobe should give it the attention it deserves!
It seems that Macromedia took more care with their products.
WAKE UP ADOBE!
January 8th, 2009 at 4:18 am
I’m having the same problems. Since I work at Adobe I’ll look into it, its clearly serious. I have noticed that you can fix the problem, at least temporarily, by just editing the text (ie, changing the kerning).
January 8th, 2009 at 5:01 am
not just the text problem but I noticed a lot of performance issues. There was a time when I was saving a file, took more than 5 seconds just to save.
This is the worst version of Fireworks.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I’m having some serious problems editing a complex layout that I made in fireworks cs3. It has a lot of slices for backgrounds and buttons. It’s taking me ages just to change the alpha options on some gif slices. What took before just half a second now takes 30 and all the cpu resources. I have no idea of what the hell is going on, and don’t want to have to go back to CS3, mainly to not to have to suffer the horrible process of installing it.
Another thing that I can’t understand is why fireworks is consuming 2%-3% of the cpu randomly when it is minimized doing nothing…
January 10th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
I’m having these problems as well, it’s slowing me down and causing much frustration. I’m having problems with the text engine and performance issues, too. Sucks.
Do they test this shit?
January 27th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
The problem with these “suites” is that Adobe needs to set a target date for the release of ALL the apps and obviously one or more applications are not ready and get shipped anyway to meet the target date….and unfortunately our beloved FW got the shaft this time around….it was obviously not ready to ship. IMHO, Adobe engineers should have pulled the plug on the “new and improved text engine” and perfected it for CS5.
All the same problems here. I’m more concerned at the lousy anti-aliasing that CS4 is rendering than the text jump problem since the rendering is inferior to all previous versions. What are they thinking? A “new and improved text engine” that is obviously a huge disappointment.
Other issues:
- Auto kerning seems to be non-functioning
- Text placement/positioning and text handles are flaky (as discussed above)
- When you open a CS2/CS3 PNG and confirm to the new text engine conversion, I would like CS4 to also fix the font formatting problems (i.e. original text block formatted in CS3 as MyriadPro Condensed Bold should have the old bold button “B” deactivated and the correct font applied.
- Conversion of CS2/CS3 button symbols with text formatting applied is a mess
- Type a text block with some effects (drop shadow); dupe it, flip it vertically (to create a reflection) and the kerning and character alignment doesn’t always match exactly! (this was also a problem in CS3 so nothing new).
I could keep going, but I’ve wasted enough time with this “not ready for primetime release”….back to CS3 for now.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Hi Eric!
Sigh… so many damn bugs!
My problem is that CS4 is better at converting to PSD-files than CS3 and I need that in my workflow, so I have to struggle with these issues daily - though they strangely don’t appear that often as in the beginning… but I still growl at that lousy anti-aliasing!!
Why don’t they test it?
January 31st, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Yeah…I decided to keep both CS3 and CS4 installed for similar reasons. Just can’t do work with just one or the other due to limitations with one and bugs with the other. You’re right about the improved PSD import filter though…
The more I use CS4, the more bugs I find. Adobe sure dropped the ball on this version with lousy beta testing (no offense to anyone reading this who beta tested CS4, but if you told Adobe that it was stable and ready to go to manufacturing, shame on you!) Most likely the CS4 shipping deadline approached and nobody had any choice in the matter.
February 9th, 2009 at 8:20 am
[...] como es un problema generalizado hay un montón de sitios en los que se habla de ello. Por ejemplo éste. De hecho me encontrado con el blog [en] de un currante del equipo Fireworks y, evidentemente, ya [...]
February 10th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
For me there is an even bigger problem. If you take a screen shot of a web page, say something that uses 11px Verdana, and then try to match that font in Fireworks CS4 (for a mock-up perhaps) you can’t do it! It seems that CS3 used the same text engine that the OS uses, but CS4 is on another planet. I spend my day taking screen shots and replacing sections of text and graphics to show people how a new design might work. This is fine in CS3 because it uses the same text rendering engine as the browser — the fonts matched exactly. What a pity!
February 11th, 2009 at 4:01 am
Ditto Patrick! I’m having the same terrible issues trying to replicate mockups for clients which was a big reason why I had to reinstall FW CS3. It’s been 4 months now since Adobe released CS4 and still no updates to fix this terrible new text engine.
February 19th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Same Problem. But this is not the only one. This release is totally annoying me. Hope they will fix their stuff asap.
March 20th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Yeah. We get all of the above issues with our copies of Fireworks CS4.
The worst by far though is that text looks like shit 90% of the time. The aliasing in CS4 sucks. It has driven me to set type in Illustrator and then import into Photoshop.
If Adobe’s goal with CS4 was to kill Fireworks, they might have done it. Fireworks is slipping from our daily work flow. Which is not cool. We’ve been using it since v1 back with Macromedia. And believe me, we are actively looking for open solutions, such as GIMP or indie apps like Pixelmator. So frustrated.
March 20th, 2009 at 3:48 am
I agree Julian, Fireworks is almost a trash because of this. Also, I really don’t know why they decided to remove the system anti-alias feature.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:06 pm
To fix the text anti aliasing problem I have applied a .5 Gaussian Blur to large text, In most cases it looks very nice after doing that, I use FW CS4 for web design so the smaller simpler text is usually rendered by the browser so haven’t tested the blur on that.
April 4th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Just started working on Fireworks CS4 this week - I can’t believe this hasn’t been fixed - or no one picked this up in Beta - I suspect they did pick it up but released the program anyway. But now its 6 months later - is this still not fixed? Adobe?
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:25 am
This bug is driving me crazy. No word on a fix yet?
April 30th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Noticed several more bugs running Fireworks CS4 trial on Vista Business 64. Here they are:
1. Sometimes when opening Fireworks PNG source file, “layers” palette is empty. You need to close open documents and reopen them to access layers.
2. If you have complex artwork with multiple objects overlaying one another, some objects have blend modes and gradient masks, then often you encounter problems with exporting images. Fireworks fails to render properly all these objects and in exported image you’ll see abrupt gradients, different colors like some blend modes are perverted. “Image Preview view” shows the same distorted artwork as exported image.
This is really annoying, because when you finished your work and ready to export it you discover you need to tweak some objects to mimic previous appearance so the Fireworks could export them without spoiling.
3. When opening PSD Fireworks discards masks applied to bitmap objects.
4. Sometimes objects on the canvas disappears or becomes partially hidden. Usually it happens with objects that have live filters applied to them. You have to hide this object, then switch it back on, then it looks ok.
5. Hot keys only work in English keyboard layout. For example if you need to type some Russian text you have to swith to English, press “T”, switch to Russisn, type in the text, hit “Esc”, swith back to English, hit “V”. Consumes a lot of time when working with texts. As far as i know Fireworks is the only Adobe application that suffers from such bug. Please please fix it.
6. If in Windows Explorer you open a file with Fireworks and then click “Save as” Fireworks saves the file NOT in the same folder from where it was opened. It saves it in the last folder Firewors worked with. It takes much time browsing folders if you work with multiple files. Once again Fireworks is the only Adobe application that suffers from such bug. Other programs save file in the same folder where it was opened.
7. If you apply “Life Filter” to an object, for example Glow filter and then apply a vector mask to this object, you’ll notice that Live filter is not properly masked. Looks like live filter is applied to a masked object, not a mask applied to an object with filter how it was done. You have no other choice but only flatten the object with applied filter and then mask it.
In general, development team did a lot of work, implemented many new features. But with this release Fireworks becomed slower, consumes more PC resources. It runs slowly on Core Duo T9400 with 4 gigs of ram. Many of old bugs from previous version where not fixed + some new appeared.
Looks like the main goal was to stuff Fireworks with new features. It’s speed, stability and usability were less taken care of. But these 3 are crucial to the end users. I think they will not have reasons to upgrade unless bugs are fixed.
Thank you.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:10 am
The Adobe Fireworks CS4 team has released the much awaited patch to fix some of the big issues related to text and stability. The update can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/support/fireworks/downloads_updaters.html . The automatic update for the application from Adobe Update Manager (AUM) within Fireworks CS4 application is also available.
After applying the update, please ensure that the version screen now shows as 10.0.3.011. Please spread this information so that users who might be affected can benefit from this announcement.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:14 am
finally!!
May 9th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
tested the new update, the text is still like shit!!!
b
May 14th, 2009 at 10:46 am
this update does sweet FA to fix the text issues reported here, can’t even install the workaround mentioned at the top of this post as the CS4 extension manager just crashes on install of said extension.
Seriously, FFS Adobe, sort your sh*t out! you’re just alienating your dedicated community of users!
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 pm
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