Bug LaTeX loading freezes system for ~1 min

Greg Bernhardt

We are now using MathJax 2.1 Please let me know if you still get the freeze.

Borg

I went to the first page of this thread and it froze. My XP work computer doesn't freeze even though I have the same ancient version of Firefox on it. Oh well.

Greg Bernhardt

Is there anything in a debug or error log? Why not upgrade FF?

Borg

No, I haven't seen any errors. I think that it just gets stuck while loading and there isn't really any error. It's a fascinating problem but I haven't tried to seriously debug it. Maybe I'll turn on Firebug one of these days to see what's trying to load when it freezes. I don't upgrade because of work requirements on the web applications that I work with.

BTW, I'm just commenting in case it helps others. It doesn't really bother me but it's nice to know what has been causing it to occur.

lisab

I just got one opening this thread -

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=647183

Total freeze for about a minute.

Greg Bernhardt

what browser and version?

Borg

I think that I may have figured this out. I did some reading about the MathJax software yesterday and noticed that it prefers to use specific fonts but will still work if it doesn't find them. My XP work computer that doesn't freeze is much older and likely has additional fonts installed that are more compatible with MathJax. From the MathJax Font Help page
I suspect that on certain computer configurations, Windows (or the browser) gets confused while trying to figure out which font to use if you don't have the STIX font installed or something close. Once it figures out what to use, it doesn't lock up again until you've restarted your computer. I would bet that you can recreate the freeze at will by clearing your browser cache and revisiting the page.

So I followed the instruction on the help page to download and install the fonts. The zip file has two folders of fonts. I didn't know if Windows would figure out the directories so I copied the contents of both folders into the C:\Windows\Fonts directory. Today, I went straight to the page that Lisab linked to and had no freeze.

Mute

I have installed the fonts and will check whether or not this resolves the problem, hopefully tomorrow. Thanks for finding this out!

AlephZero

In that case, it could also be related to the number of fonts installed on your PC. Some software packages install literally hundreds, "just in case" you want to create some weird looking text one day.

Borg

Now I have to compare the number of fonts installed on my two computers?
Windows 7 that was freezing - 149 before the 15 new STIX fonts.
I'll check the other one tomorrow.

Mute

Installing the fonts seems to have fixed the issue, at least when I just tested today. Will update if I encounter another freeze.

AlephZero

150 fonts shouldn't be a problem. Windows itself probably installs that many, if you count all the variants (bold, italic, etc) as different fonts.

But people who "collect" demo versions of DTP software etc might accumulate nearer 15,000 than 150, as time goes by.

Borg

My Windows 7 computer is only a year old and I haven't installed any fonts on it before this. I expect that my work computer has more - I have installed fonts on it in the past. I really think that the work computer has a non-standard font that my home computer doesn't have that MathJax found more palatable. I'm not going to try to determine which one it might be since the STIX font seems to cure the problem.

Borg

As expected, my work computer has more fonts - 312.

Mute

I have about 266 items in my fonts folder, after installing the STIX fonts. Some of the files are transparent - not sure what that means. It looks like a bunch of fonts were installed by mathematica and by enabling east-asian language support/input.

Again, installing the STIX fonts seems to have resolved the issue for me, as it did for Borg. I would guess along the lines of Borg's hypothesis that when mathjax can't find the font it's looking for it starts trying to look through all the others, and the number (and type?) of fonts it has to look through might account for part of the typical length of the time during which the system is frozen.

Does this resolve the issue for anyone else? Particularly the people who said they were seeing warnings/error messages just before the freeze?

Borg

Lisab told me that the font fixed her freeze issue as well.

@Greg: Is there a Latex FAQ somewhere? This might be a good addition for it.