[mythtv-theming] Font face naming differences on different platforms (was Re: What fonts are guaranteed to be on a Linux box?)

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Thu Aug 22 21:24:18 UTC 2013


On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Michael T. Dean
<mtdean at thirdcontact.com>wrote:

> On 08/22/2013 03:11 PM, Yeechang Lee wrote:
>
>> That said, I am not sure if the cause is necessarily OSD/theme-related
>> per se, or even with MythTV at all. I use two 0.26 frontends, one
>> Linux and one OS X. With the stock/fallback osd_subtitle.xml, both the
>> FreeMono and Droid Sans Mono fonts behave badly on the OS X frontend
>> (whether Jean-Yves' standalone or the MacPorts one). With FreeMono,
>> some punctuation marks are either partially obscured (question mark)
>> or don't appear at all (apostrophe, period). With Droid Sans Mono,
>> they appear but parts are cut off, as are other letters, notably the
>> capital W and capital O.
>>
>> Similar behavior occurs with other free mono fonts I've tested,
>> Liberation, DejaVu, and Ubuntu. Only the proprietary Bitstream Vera
>> Sans Mono--that Liberation and DejaVu are clones of--seems to appear
>> correctly on OS X, but of course we can't distribute it. Since, as I
>> mentioned, this only seems to occur on OS X, it's quite possibly an
>> Apple-specific font-rendering issue.
>>
>
> Oops.  This reminds me that k-man on irc noticed that (sometimes? for some
> fonts? always?) the font face name is exposed differently on his Mac OS X
> system than on his GNU/Linux systems:
>
> http://irc.mythtv.org/ircLog/**channel/3/2011-08-15<http://irc.mythtv.org/ircLog/channel/3/2011-08-15>
>
> Try putting the .otf, .ttf, or .ttc file(s) for the fonts into your theme
> directory (at least temporarily) and running the frontend on both platforms
> with -v gui,file --loglevel debug and you should see information like:
>
> In file '<filename>', found font(s) <face name>'
> or
> Unable to register font(s) in file '<filename>'
>
> Do you get different face names or errors or anything?  The log messages
> will show exactly what Qt gets from the underlying platform font managers.
>  If they're different, we'd have to fix this with code (and it wouldn't be
> that much code--like I have no excuse for not having finished it in 2 years
> :( ).  I still think the approach he asked for (and I described) in the IRC
> conversation is the best approach--basically a fallback face name approach,
> similar to that used by CSS.
>
> I'd also like Stuart Morgan's opinion on the approach before we put it in.
>
> It definitely sounds like a font substitution problem.  Monospaced font
characters should obviously have the same width, and when they don't, it
can be a problem with the font definition (the font designer wasn't careful
about keeping monospacing), or there are missing characters that get
substituted from a similar font, or the entire font is substituted.  I
expect it is the latter, because I am cursed with the ability to notice
miniscule deviations in alignment/spacing and it's been a long time since
I've seen any issues with FreeMono or Droid Sans Mono captions.  Hopefully
Mike's suggestions can root out the root cause.

Jim
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