Texmaker not responding

[SuperTech]

Thank you for sharing the file. I was unable to reproduce the lagging issue — the file opens and runs without any slowness on my end.

Regarding the tables you mentioned: these are actually EMF images, which are not supported on macOS. However, even their presence did not cause any slowdown here.

One more thing — the file you sent is only 24 KB, whereas you mentioned a 5 MB file. Could you please send us that larger file? This may be the one causing the issue.

[RJDrdul]

Hi! Thanks for following up on this issue. I just re-opened the small one-page 24KB file in TextMaker and for some reason I can't reproduce the lagging issue, either. It previously occurred with the 24KB file and in the large 5MB file that the page was extracted from (but if I deleted the page with the EMF images from the 5MB file the problem didn't occur any more). In any event, the problem hasn't occurred with any other documents, so unless it happens again with a different document I will assume it was a one-time glitch.

Regrading the EMF images, they are visible in Word for Mac, so I assume that means they can be supported on a Mac, it's just that they are not supported in TextMaker. Is there any plan to add EMF support in the new version of TextMaker (the 2026 version)?

[SuperTech]

Is there any plan to add EMF support in the new version of TextMaker (the 2026 version)?

It is not planned for the 2026 version, and the reason is a technical one. EMF is a Microsoft format that is tied to Windows by design. It is a vector metafile, which means the file does not contain an image in the way a PNG does, but a recorded sequence of drawing commands for the Windows GDI interface — select this pen, set this clipping region, place these glyphs of this font at these positions. Windows can hand such a file straight back to GDI for replay, since that interface is part of the system.

On Linux and macOS there is no equivalent, so the entire drawing model would have to be reimplemented and matched precisely, down to raster operations, region arithmetic and font metrics; text in particular is often stored as glyph indices of one specific Windows font, which cannot be reproduced faithfully once that font is unavailable. That is a considerable undertaking for a format used only in documents originating on Windows, which is why it has not been taken up so far.

If you need such graphics to travel between platforms, converting them to PNG etc under Windows beforehand is the dependable route.

[RJDrdul]

Thanks for the explanation! It's not a problem I often encounter, and I can deal with it by requesting people send me a document with PNG images instead, or a PDF so that I can see the EMF images.