inkscape displays and exports Helvetica R wrong

[Alex Valavanis]

From: Andreas Barth <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: inkscape displays and exports Helvetica R wrong
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2008 20:22:39 +0100
[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]
Package: inkscape
Version: 0.44.1-1

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is really a bug in inkscape, but it seems so to me.

My example for reproduction is this:
Generate a postscript document with an Helvetica R in it, like e.g. the
following tex file does (latex $file.tex; dvips $file.dvi), convert it
to svg (pstoedit -f plot-svg $file.ps > $file.svg), and compare the look
alike of the R between any postscript viewer and gimp on the one side,
and inkscape.

The correct Helvetica R consists on the right lower side of an partly
straight down line, compared with an Arial R which consists of an
diagonal line. Evince or Ghostview display the correct R from the
ps-file here, inkscape shows and exports it wrong. (The png files are
exported from gimp directly from the postscript format, and from via
inkscape - in the second case I also zoomed the R but that shouldn't
matter for our purpose.)

Cheers,
Andi
[test.tex (text/x-tex, attachment)]
[test.ps (application/postscript, attachment)]
[test.svg (image/svg+xml, attachment)]
[test-inkscape.png (image/png, attachment)]
[test-gimp.png (image/png, attachment)]
Message #10 received at <email address hidden> (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Alex Valavanis <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>, Andreas Barth <email address hidden>, <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: inkscape displays and exports Helvetica R wrong
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:41:48 +0100
tags 459638 moreinfo
thanks

Hi Andreas,

I am checking up on a few old Debian bugs. You reported the
following: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=459638

I think this is likely to be a pstoedit issue...

* When I try the SVG file you attached, I can reproduce the bug... the
font appears incorrectly in Inkscape, eog and rsvg-view.

This is apparently because the SVG text element contains the CSS style
attribute: "font-family:'Helvetica',sans-serif". The Helvetica font
specification is quoted. If you get rid of the quotation marks, the
font appears correctly in all three viewers.

* When I generate the SVG file myself, using pstoedit 3.50-3, I find
that the font appears correctly in all three viewers. Here, the
font-family attribute is used directly inside the <text> element, and
the font name is not quoted.

Please could you let me know if you still experience the problem with
a newer version of pstoedit?

Thanks,

Alex

[su_v (suv-lp)]

On OS X 10.7.5:
- reproduced with Inkscpae 0.47, 0.48,5
- not reproduced with Inkscape 0.91 r13725, 0.91+devel r14397

The style attribute for the text as defined in the provided SVG file:
   style="font-family:'Helvetica',sans-serif;font-size:17.215;stroke:none;fill:black;"

Inkscape 0.91 supports single quotes for names in the 'font-family' style property, as well as font-family lists (for fallbacks).

The provided SVG file generated with pstoedit/GNU libplot 4.1 contains other flawed SVG code which may prevent rendering in some SVG viewers: Batik 1.8 for example reports "The "even-odd" identifier is not a valid value for the "fill-rule" property". It also lacks the default namespace declaration for SVG (browsers don't render the content; they present the XML document tree).

Current pstoedit 3.70 with GNU libplot 4.4 (plotutils 2.6) based on the provided PostScript file produces SVG output with a font-family list without quotes (renders as expected with 'R' in Helvetica in Inkscape 0.48.5 and 0.91). The SVG output also uses the correct attribute value for 'fill-rule' ("evenodd"), and includes the namespace declaration for SVG.

Re eog and rsvg-view: both use librsvg as SVG renderer, please check the bug tracker of librsvg for reports related to quoted font family names in style properties. Please note that the position of the <text> element in the generated SVG file is outside the defined viewport area (square area of 8in x 8in), so it is not supposed to be displayed visibly in SVG renderers which clip to the initial viewport (browsers, any viewers based on librsvg). Inkscape as SVG Editor displays content outside the initial viewport, and thus allows easy visual checking of the reported issue.

Closing as 'Fix Released' for project 'Inkscape', milestone set to 0.91.