Disappearing Fonts in Xara Products

[handrawn]

well there's a 'one we prepared earlier' response if ever I saw one.... EDIT - the one Mike quoted from MS, not Gare


EDIT: as for Gare's response - well yesss.... indeedie...


que sera....

[mwenz]

Isn't it conceivable that vendors, and not Microsoft, will have to patch this font thing, because they've been doing something with fetching glyph outlines that they were advised long ago not to do? And Adobe was one of the few vendors who listened?

Yep, from the MS quote, it appears it will be software vendors that need to do the patch(es).

I find with a bit of chagrin that all MS applications I use are also affected. Still leaves the question of how a software vendor is going to handle previous versions...What a task and PR nightmare for the smaller vendors who cannot or will not patch previous versions.

Take care, Mike

[handrawn]

in practice how common is it for vendors to support earlier versions?

its the customers who 'suffer' at the end of the day if they are using unsupported versions and there are no patches, they have to upgrade and/or switch to another product

[Gare]

I think we'd be best to let this thing simmer until a Xara engineer checks in here.

Naturally, we can postulate in the meanwhile.

I myself postulate that this sucks.

;)

-g

[sjukmidlands]

It happened to me this evening when opening a document to get it ready for an urgent print deadline on Monday. Panic mode for a while while I figured out what the problem was here, and then had to uninstall the security update so that I can continue to work on the document. I don't have the luxury of waiting for Microsoft or Xara to fix this, so I had to uninstall the update.

[BigP]

Hi,
I am in the UK and have experienced the missing font s issue today, with Xara designer pro 6
I have just followed the guidance here, and removed the windows update KB2753842, and it has solved the problem. :-) Thanks
Cheers
BigP

[Pasha A.]

Yep. Windows is still bug-style OS
Deleted update has solved this problem. Big thanks for advice!

[mwenz]

Pasha, it isn't a bug. It is doing what it is suppose to do. But perhaps it is a little too vigilant in its work...

In reviewing the MS KBs from the past, something similar has happened some 7 times as regards security issues with fonts. Most of those times, it was with exploits in TrueType fonts. Apple had the same issue last year (maybe two years) with this exact font security vulnerability. Except for the Mac people who were affected, they had to revert to their previous operating system release to rid themselves of the problem.

Now, in reading all those KBs, the forums when these things happened in the past and the web sites reporting the issues and software that was affected, MS did come through with a way to prevent the exploit while not breaking software and did so relatively quickly. So perhaps there is hope for the best of both worlds.

Take care, Mike

[Ian B]

Deleting the update solved the problem for me but every time I switch the computer on the update gets applied again. Can I prevent this happening?

[Gare]

Go to Control Panel>Windows Update, and then on the left column there's Change Settings.

"Download Update but let me choose whether to install them" is probably the best option for the balance between never installing a security update, and letting windows reboot your machine during the night.

My Best,

Gary