[Inkscape-user] Getting basic fonts to show up correctly

[marc0047]

A newbie here trying to understand fonts in Inkscape on Mac OS X (10.4.6):

Basic fonts like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana are not showing up with their
entire families in the Text and Font box.

Arial, for example, doesn't show up, but 'Arial Black', 'Arial Hebrew',
'Arial Narrow', and 'Arial Rounded MT Bold' does.

In another example, Georgia does show up, but its other family members, such
as italic, bold, and bold italic, are not present.

Anyone have tips on solving this issue?

Thanks.

[Arnout Standaert]

Post by marc0047
Basic fonts like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana are not showing up with their
entire families in the Text and Font box.
Arial, for example, doesn't show up, but 'Arial Black', 'Arial Hebrew',
'Arial Narrow', and 'Arial Rounded MT Bold' does.
In another example, Georgia does show up, but its other family members, such
as italic, bold, and bold italic, are not present.

Similar problems are present in Windows builds (Truetype fonts don't
show in the list, Symbol for instance), and have been for a long time.
AFAIK, this is a problem with the underlying font handling libraries
(Pango), so the current option is to wait until font detection gets
fixed over there.

Then again, I don't know too much detail myself, maybe your problem is
something more specific than what I'm describing...

Regards,
Arnout

[Bryce Harrington]

Post by Arnout Standaert

Post by marc0047
Basic fonts like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana are not showing up with

their

Post by marc0047
entire families in the Text and Font box.
Arial, for example, doesn't show up, but 'Arial Black', 'Arial Hebrew',
'Arial Narrow', and 'Arial Rounded MT Bold' does.
In another example, Georgia does show up, but its other family members, such
as italic, bold, and bold italic, are not present.

Similar problems are present in Windows builds (Truetype fonts don't
show in the list, Symbol for instance), and have been for a long time.
AFAIK, this is a problem with the underlying font handling libraries
(Pango), so the current option is to wait until font detection gets
fixed over there.

We have a TON of problems like this in the codebase. By and large
they're all due to the font selector widget. I think they're probably
all fairly straightforward to fix, but no one is looking into them
currently. There's a bunch of bugs that could be closed.

Would anyone like to devote a bit of time into investigating them? I
don't think it'd take a huge amount of time to investigate, but a few
weekends to track it down. I can give some pointers to get you going in
the right direction if you're interested.

Bryce

[jiho]

Post by marc0047
Basic fonts like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana are not showing up with their
entire families in the Text and Font box.
Arial, for example, doesn't show up, but 'Arial Black', 'Arial
Hebrew',
'Arial Narrow', and 'Arial Rounded MT Bold' does.
In another example, Georgia does show up, but its other family
members, such
as italic, bold, and bold italic, are not present.
Anyone have tips on solving this issue?

As mentioned by somebody else, the font management in Inkscape is
done by Pango and is not directly controlled by Inkscape. On OS X,
part of the problem is that mac fonts are in .dfont or .suit format
which is not handled correctly by Pango and the effect is what you
see: only part of the family is showing up (eg. you only Arial
Regular and not Arial Bold, Arial Italics etc.). The only solution I
found to solve part of the problem is converting all those fonts
to .ttf format which is well supported by Pango. In fact .dfont
and .suit are just some kind of "bags" which contains all variants of
a font, in ttf format (eg. Arial.dfont contains ArialRegular.ttf,
ArialBold.ttf, ArialItalics.ttf etc.) plus some kerning information I
think. To break .dfont and .suit into their .ttf constituents you
need to use fondu from the command line. Fondu can be downloaded there:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?
group_id=39411&package_id=31577&release_id=362553
or obtained via fink and darwinports.
It's simple to use as long as a terminal does not frighten you. The
only thing you must be careful about is that you will end up with two
versions of each font (the one in the dfont bundle and the .ttf one)
and you should disable or remove one of those. disabling fonts is
done via FontManager.app.

Hope that helps.

JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/

[marc0047]

Thanks again Jiho! I will give that a try!

Post by jiho

Post by marc0047
Basic fonts like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana are not showing up with their
entire families in the Text and Font box.
Arial, for example, doesn't show up, but 'Arial Black', 'Arial Hebrew',
'Arial Narrow', and 'Arial Rounded MT Bold' does.
In another example, Georgia does show up, but its other family members, such
as italic, bold, and bold italic, are not present.
Anyone have tips on solving this issue?

As mentioned by somebody else, the font management in Inkscape is
done by Pango and is not directly controlled by Inkscape. On OS X,
part of the problem is that mac fonts are in .dfont or .suit format
which is not handled correctly by Pango and the effect is what you
see: only part of the family is showing up (eg. you only Arial
Regular and not Arial Bold, Arial Italics etc.). The only solution I
found to solve part of the problem is converting all those fonts
to .ttf format which is well supported by Pango. In fact .dfont
and .suit are just some kind of "bags" which contains all variants of
a font, in ttf format (eg. Arial.dfont contains ArialRegular.ttf,
ArialBold.ttf, ArialItalics.ttf etc.) plus some kerning information I
think. To break .dfont and .suit into their .ttf constituents you
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?
group_id=39411&package_id=31577&release_id=362553
or obtained via fink and darwinports.
It's simple to use as long as a terminal does not frighten you. The
only thing you must be careful about is that you will end up with two
versions of each font (the one in the dfont bundle and the .ttf one)
and you should disable or remove one of those. disabling fonts is
done via FontManager.app.
Hope that helps.
JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
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[marc0047]

Finally got around to breaking the suitcase packages into TTFs, and it
worked!

I used fontforge (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/) instead of fondu: for
this kind of thing, a GUI is much easier for me to deal with. So I opened
them up individually and used the 'Generate fonts' feature to export to
TTFs.

Thanks again!

Post by jiho

Post by marc0047
Basic fonts like Arial, Georgia, and Verdana are not showing up with their
entire families in the Text and Font box.
Arial, for example, doesn't show up, but 'Arial Black', 'Arial Hebrew',
'Arial Narrow', and 'Arial Rounded MT Bold' does.
In another example, Georgia does show up, but its other family members, such
as italic, bold, and bold italic, are not present.
Anyone have tips on solving this issue?

As mentioned by somebody else, the font management in Inkscape is
done by Pango and is not directly controlled by Inkscape. On OS X,
part of the problem is that mac fonts are in .dfont or .suit format
which is not handled correctly by Pango and the effect is what you
see: only part of the family is showing up (eg. you only Arial
Regular and not Arial Bold, Arial Italics etc.). The only solution I
found to solve part of the problem is converting all those fonts
to .ttf format which is well supported by Pango. In fact .dfont
and .suit are just some kind of "bags" which contains all variants of
a font, in ttf format (eg. Arial.dfont contains ArialRegular.ttf,
ArialBold.ttf, ArialItalics.ttf etc.) plus some kerning information I
think. To break .dfont and .suit into their .ttf constituents you
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?
group_id=39411&package_id=31577&release_id=362553
or obtained via fink and darwinports.
It's simple to use as long as a terminal does not frighten you. The
only thing you must be careful about is that you will end up with two
versions of each font (the one in the dfont bundle and the .ttf one)
and you should disable or remove one of those. disabling fonts is
done via FontManager.app.
Hope that helps.
JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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[marc0047]

Arrgh, I just encountered a new problem: by creating the new TTFs and
turning them on with FontBook, now my other apps, like Firefox, is rendering
my fonts in a weird way...!

Is there a fix for this? Or, do I sit tight for the next version? :'(

[jiho]

Post by marc0047
Arrgh, I just encountered a new problem: by creating the new TTFs and
turning them on with FontBook, now my other apps, like Firefox, is rendering
my fonts in a weird way...!

what do you see exactly? I have a problem with Firefox too where bold
text is overlapping with adjacent text or the underline of an
underlined text does not go all the way under the text. Is this the
same problem.

Post by marc0047
Is there a fix for this? Or, do I sit tight for the next version? :'(

If your problem is similar to mine, it is a known issue with Firefox
on OS X and seems to appear when some fonts are duplicated (but the
issue seems quite complicated and can arise in several contexts). It
has been reported already several times on the bugzilla of Firefox
but has not received much attention yet. I thinks it's because:
- developers think it is a marginal problem
- developers cannot reproduce it reliably (as I mentioned above the
problem seems complicated)
You can add you experience to this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288047
to get things moving a bit. But I guess meanwhile you will have to
choose between Firefox and Inkscape.
NB: a workaround I've used in Firefox is to use Lucida Grande which
does not create any problem and to force it's use (do not check the
"Allow site to choose their own fonts" check button). But know I
switched to safari, mainly because of this problem.

If you want to discuss this further I think we should do it
personally or via Mozilla bugsystem rather than here.

JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/

[marc0047]

Hi Jiho,

Thanks for the update, it's helpful to know about the Firefox bug...!

In the meantime, I have a fix: when breaking the suitcase, I now have
renamed the fonts so that they have different names. So Arial, for example,
will now be 'Arial-ttf', 'Arial-bold-ttf', 'Arial-italic-ttf', and
'Arial-bolditalic-ttf'. This way there is absolutely no substitution and
interference when font calling.

So far it works...!

Post by jiho

Post by marc0047
Arrgh, I just encountered a new problem: by creating the new TTFs and
turning them on with FontBook, now my other apps, like Firefox, is rendering
my fonts in a weird way...!

what do you see exactly? I have a problem with Firefox too where bold
text is overlapping with adjacent text or the underline of an
underlined text does not go all the way under the text. Is this the
same problem.

Post by marc0047
Is there a fix for this? Or, do I sit tight for the next version? :'(

If your problem is similar to mine, it is a known issue with Firefox
on OS X and seems to appear when some fonts are duplicated (but the
issue seems quite complicated and can arise in several contexts). It
has been reported already several times on the bugzilla of Firefox
- developers think it is a marginal problem
- developers cannot reproduce it reliably (as I mentioned above the
problem seems complicated)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288047
to get things moving a bit. But I guess meanwhile you will have to
choose between Firefox and Inkscape.
NB: a workaround I've used in Firefox is to use Lucida Grande which
does not create any problem and to force it's use (do not check the
"Allow site to choose their own fonts" check button). But know I
switched to safari, mainly because of this problem.
If you want to discuss this further I think we should do it
personally or via Mozilla bugsystem rather than here.
JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job
easier.
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
_______________________________________________
Inkscape-user mailing list
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user