Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] fonts disappear in OSX
On 2008-February-05 , at 21:40 , Gail Carmichael wrote:
jiho wrote:
On 2008-February-05 , at 19:12 , churro wrote:
- select the faulty text, open the xml editor and check what the
font attributes are (name, weight etc.)
these are the attributes: I'm using Culrz MT font-size:98.06591034px;font-style:normal;font- weight:normal;fill:#ff8080;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;stroke-width: 1px;stroke-linecap:butt;stroke-linejoin:miter;stroke-opacity: 1;font-family:Curlz MT
This is a (Microsoft I think) Font Suitcase format, which indeed causes issues. The strange thing is that it worked in an earlier version of Inkscape. I am guessing that the difference actually comes from the font itself. When did you start this piece of work? Did you upgrade your system or MS Office in between?
I've never even heard of these suitcase things (I assume you figured out the format from the file itself and not the above properties). Hopefully this means that the code I did has not adversely affected the situation. I wrote it so that it looks for my new information first, then falls back onto the old tried tested and true way.
OK, I did a little research and there's no wonder you never heard of it: it is a mac specific thing. To get a brief overview of font management on OS X (which I've always thought to be very well designed) you can skim over this: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25251 http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2024.html The Font Suitcase thing is a format dating back from OS 9 (the original Macintosh system, before it was unixified). This is a weird format, in which the whole font is stored in the resource fork and nothing is stored in the data fork. As a result the file appears to be 0 bytes: $ ll Curlz\ MT -rwxrwxr-x@ 1 root admin 0 Apr 7 2004 Curlz MT nor do they have a file extension. The font information however is just regular true type. OS X (i.e. the unixified version) does not ship with these fonts now (I'm not even sure it ever shipped with some) but supports them for backward- compatibility's sake. The only app I know that ships with such fonts is.... you guessed it: MICROSOFT Office. Well you can't ask them to be good players on a platform which is competing with them, for sure.
I don't expect support to appear in Pango anytime soon since the format is deprecated. Anyway, it seems perfectly safe to convert those to regular TTF, no information is lost: it just moves it from the resource fork to the data fork. It just means each user has to do it.
PS: I would be curious to know which format Office 2008 uses for its font on OS X. Does someone have info on this?
PPS: you may see some work on font suitcases in Pango, but this is not (AFAIK) related to this particular format. It is probably related to the new font suitcase format introduced with OS X, which has the dfont extension and is kind of the contrary: everything is in the data fork and the resource fork is empty of font information. This makes working with this format easier. But it is at the same time quite new so support is not yet perfect. These font cause the typeface bugs on Inkscape/OS X, in which some font faces are available in the menu (bold, semi bold etc) but selecting them does not do anything.
[...]
Please send this the needed info to Gail too, she's the font expert.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with this suitcase thing you mentioned. Normally I would be able to look it up and learn about it etc, but unfortunately I have a heavy course-load for the semester and probably don't have the necessary time to devote to it. I am cc'ing the devel list in case anyone else has the knowledge to have a look. Still, we should try to determine for sure if it could be an issue with my code, and I can (hopefully) fix that if it is.
Well something changed recently apparently. I hope that with the help of Nick you'll be able to reduce the time frame of occurrence of the bug.
Hope that helps.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
jiho wrote:
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with this suitcase thing you mentioned. Normally I would be able to look it up and learn about it etc, but unfortunately I have a heavy course-load for the semester and probably don't have the necessary time to devote to it. I am cc'ing the devel list in case anyone else has the knowledge to have a look. Still, we should try to determine for sure if it could be an issue with my code, and I can (hopefully) fix that if it is.
Well something changed recently apparently. I hope that with the help of Nick you'll be able to reduce the time frame of occurrence of the bug.
Ok, here's my theory: Part of the design of my work was to not show any fonts in the UI that pango could not recognize, so if that's the case, that's why it's not showing up at all now. This is because everything goes through pango at some point so you ended up being able to select fonts that weren't usable. What's really interesting is that Nick was previously able to use these fonts even if they don't work with pango (assuming that is truly the case). Maybe there was a roundabout path available before that has been cut off now. Not sure if restoring that path is really desirable, as we seem to have decided to restrict ourselves to supporting what CSS and pango support (at least for now). Anyone have any opinions on this?
Gail
On 2008-February-05 , at 23:52 , Gail Carmichael wrote:
jiho wrote:
OK, I did a little research and there's no wonder you never heard of it: it is a mac specific thing.
Oh yeah, and I'm on Windows, so I guess I won't be able to test this eh?
probably not, but who knows, it is shipped by Microsoft so maybe these are common things on windows too. I don't know I'm on a Mac ;)
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
jiho wrote:
On 2008-February-05 , at 23:52 , Gail Carmichael wrote:
jiho wrote:
OK, I did a little research and there's no wonder you never heard of it: it is a mac specific thing.
Oh yeah, and I'm on Windows, so I guess I won't be able to test this eh?
probably not, but who knows, it is shipped by Microsoft so maybe these are common things on windows too. I don't know I'm on a Mac ;)
Can't seem to install it as is on Windows (no big surprise). I don't see how I am going to investigate this issue, and as I said, if pango doesn't support it, I'm not sure whether we would consider it a valid issue (other than the fact that it worked before and doesn't now). Maybe someone on a Mac can see if they can tell what the difference before and after is? Anyone have the time? I can point you in the right direction at least.
Gail
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jiho