Mysterious crash when caching a font on Android

totebo

When I try to cache all the characters of a large font the app crashes. I get this error message from Logcat on Android:

05-11 10:01:50.153 30573-30599/com.totebo.nobrakes2 A/libc: Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV), code 1, fault addr 0x0 in tid 30599 (GLThread 5611)   [ 05-11 10:01:50.154 570: 570 W/ ] debuggerd: handling request: pid=30573 uid=10336 gid=10336 tid=30599

This is on a Pixel XL. I suspect it's got something to do with the font creating too big a bitmap. When I use less glyphs it doesn't crash. I will need all the glyphs for all the languages eventually, so I'm a bit stumped on how to resolve this.

Any ideas?

simwhi

@totebo
We have split our fonts into separate language groups so we haven't experience this.

totebo

That's a good call. So you load each group on demand?

How on earth did you separate it?!

simwhi

@totebo Yes, that's correct.

We analysed the language translations to determine which unique characters were required for each font file. For example, the characters for Thai, Japanese and Chinese are separated into different files. European characters are combined and stored in a separate file too.

totebo

That's clever and makes total sense. Efficient too, not loading any glyphs that aren't used.

SinisterSoft

Have a lower resolution font when not using standard characters - depending on the language use one font or the other.