On Feb 20, 2006, at 12:05 PM, Pedro Kroger wrote:
Hi,
I'm trying to use inkscape to open a svg file generated by lilypond but I'm having some problems: inkscape shows boxes instead of music notes. I do have the corrected fonts installed (have tried them with other programs).
Are you *sure*??
What other fonts did you use, and with what methods?
...
I thought the problem was related to some library, but firefox can render this beautifully using the emmentaler font:
<html>  </html>
I'm using inkscape 0.43, fontforge 20060125, and pango 1.10.2.
Any ideas or pointers?
Well... there are two issues.
First of all, that font is using the Private Use Area range in Unicode. U+E000 to U+F8FF. That's one sign of complication. There are many ways to approach this, but on is to have multiple mapping tables in the font that are used in different situations.
The second main issue is that the SVG file is using SVG fonts, which Inkscape does not yet support. That actually embeds the glyph data as drawing commands right in the SVG file.
One thing I did was a simple test. I installed that font on my Mac (OS X 10.4.5) and then tried to do the same html test. I used <font face="emmentaler"> in the html. It did change the glyph style in Safari, but it was still a box. I then tried in FireFox 1.5.0.1 and saw the same failure.
This would indicate to me that there is possibly something wrong with the structure of that font, as Macs are known for their strong typography support. The file is OTF and not TTF, so I can't run my little font analyzing tool I did a while back. I guess at some point I could update that if needed.
Further complicating things is the way in which you generated that font dump. You used FontForge to create that, however... FontForge appears to be the tool used to create the font in the first place. Therefore, it's very likely that FontForge can read things since it wrote them and has certain expectations that match, but a third-party pathway can expose problems.
Which other applications can you use this font with? Which OS are you running? Have you tried in a range of GTK+ applications?
Oh, another thing... I played with the font some in Font Book (the default font tool in OS X), and although things were all listed in previewing the font's repertoire, when I tried to edit its preview to include U+E125, it showed up there as a missing glyph.
So, although there might be some Inkscape-specific bug, it's looking more like a slightly malformed font that certain rendering libs fail with.