Many problems, e.g. using Text

[voom]

Today I have tried to use X8 the first time for production. It is hard to overcome differences when being used to another software, but I was willing to give it a try. With X4 I have more or less "played around" a lot, but when things needed to be done I went back to my very old but merited Photoshop 6.

Strangely enough PSP did not import my PSD file correctly, textlayers where converted to raster. So I wrote the text anew, not a big deal. Except that text most of the time only showed fragments of what was really written. Sometimes it looked like there suddenly a tab was added within word. Trying to delete the tab nothing happens, until with a lag of several seconds it shows that there never was a tab at all just a display error and now parts of the word where deleted. All in all these errors where not little bugs here and there but appear more than 90% of the time, rendering the textfunction completely unusable. (Will try again if this only happens with imported PS-files or also with a project started within PSP).

Also during the 30 Minutes of stubbornly trying to keep using PSP every few minutes the program froze completely for 20 to 60 seconds. Twice it crashed completely while loosing the latest changes to the project. After the first crash I switched from the 64bit-version of X8 to the 32bit-version, but it was the same no matter wich version.

Then I tried to open the file that I had saved as .pspimage in X4 because that had proven to be more stable, but the format is not backwards-compatible. So in the end I did what I alwas did and started the whole project over in my old PS 6.

I do not like the newer Photoshop at all and the CC is a no go so I really had my hopes up for PSP, even willing to build up a new workflow. But the more I try using it in production (for what my need are) the more it keeps disappointing me.

I don't just want to rant about it, I still hope there are answers or fixes for these problems. Would it work stable and reliably, I could really get used to using PSP.

[voom]

Text issues: it happens the same way with a single textlayer on a simple background in a newly created .pspimage - only a little less often. (70% instead of 90% of the time) It gets more severe if a layer-effect is applied to the text. Parts of the text disappear especially when switching tools, e.g. text to pointer and back. Sometimes all of the text appears when going into textedit-mode, but not always. So not only the preview of the textlayer is broken, but editing the text is also impossible.

When making the screenshots below I discovered, that the problems seem to occur only when X8 is in fullscreen, while as a smaller window it seems to be ok. I wanted to make screenshots of the whole program and thus made it smaller, at once the text appeared again and while in window mode it seemed to stay that way. As soon as I went back to fullscreen, the text went back to a garbled mess.

[voom]

Futher investigating the issue in window mode at once the problems massively appeared there too. It seems it generally works for a little while and the comes a longer time when it does not. Any connection to outer circumstances and settings seems coincidental. It just comes and goes.

[voom]

Aha! Interesting. I keep talking to myself because it might help other later with the same issue

I put X8 into Win7 compatibility mode and also checked not to scale for high DPI. Since then so far the problem is gone, even in that aforementioned PSD-file with many textlayers, even with text having layereffects etc. That seems to settle this issue.

About the freezes and crashes I will report later, if those still occur in comp.-mode.

[hartpaul]

I am very confused at what you are trying to do.You mention text, PSD files, PSP files Photoshop and missing text , freezes, lack of interchangeability between PSP and PS.

Can you give a step by step outline (as if for a beginner) at what you do and what you are trying to do. Especially if the series of steps can produce a consistent problem.
I have X8 on a Windows 10 machine so can attempt to duplicate your problems
Which version of X8 do you have SP1 or SP2?

[voom]

Well lets focus on the text-issue then. I have SP2, 32 and 64 installed. Using the text-tool in any way leads to the display of garbled text, missing letters, large spaces within words and other effects, 90% of the time. The issue affects 32bit and 64bit alike.

Since I put PSP in Win 7 compatibility mode the problem has disappeared. So I found a solution that works for me, I should have posted after completely investigating all options with the workaround instead of documenting the process

About the instability I still have to work on a real project for some time to see if that also works out better in Win7 mode.

[MarkZ]

When using Text I find sometimes that when I select text it appears portions of the text is not selected. But if I go ahead and edit that text, all of the selected text (including the portion that appears not to have been selected) is changed as I intended. I think this is dependent on the font used and the zoom level. It sounds as if this is similar to what you experience.

There was another problem with vectors whereby the rendering did not keep up with the action until the zoom was decreased but I think that was fixed. Yes, more work needed to make text and vectors work as the user expects them to.