missing ">" "<" symbols on windows

[Daniel Schürmann]

The unicode symbols for next and previous are missing in windows XP.
It is used in Shade / LateNight / Deere for switching effects.
It is replaced by "□"

Probably the open sans font is replaced for some reasons.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

The issue can be reproduces on WinXP 32 bit and on Win10 64 bit using release 5443

[jus (jus)]

FWIW
This is potentially fixed for Deere, where i replaced all the unicode Characters with icons. Just need to find the time to finish the other pending changes and submit a PR :-(

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

The installed open sans font should includes unicode symbols.
Replacing the symbols by Icons will help here, but is only a band aid for the underlying bug that the desired font is not used.
Mixxx will probably still fail to show for example chineese artists.
Also the desired alignemnet of some lables fails, for example the clock in Shade skin.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

It looks like "Open Sans" is quite incomplete and Windows Xp fails to use a replacement font.
Ubuntu switches to "DejaVu Sans" for ◀ (<) and ▶ (>).
Windows Xp fails also showing Japanese fronds like 豚 the whole title appears as □
Ubuntu switches to "Droid Sans Fallback"

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

Just noticed that on Win Xp this page is shows the ◀ and ▶ but the japanese character is displayes as sqare with a number inside. (using Firefox)

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

After installing "Droid Sans Fallback" on windows, I can see the japanese character on this page.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

Conclusion:
We may ship "Droid Sans Fallback" in addition to "Open Sans"
Open Sans renders better in Shade and Windows Xp and Droid Sans is the Fallback for missing uicode characters.
The style will look like that:
font-family: "Open Sans", "Droid Sans Fallback";

However, the properties dialog and header bar still suffers the □□□□□□□ tiltle.
ITunes and Windows mediaplayer are suffering the same issues.

Any comments?

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

The fallback fonts for ◀ and ▶ on windows XP trough 10 seams to be broken.
I have solved it With Shade, by replacing the text buttons by bitmap buttons.
This should be done in Deere (on the way) and LateNight as well.

@Owen: can you take care of this?

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

The Japanese character issue, is slightly different. My Win XP has no fonts for non latin characters installed.
My Win 10 has such fonts and the track is displayed properly in library header bar and at the decks.
So the XP problem is a Windows Issue, not MIxxx's in the first place.

However the characters are rendered by the fall-back font on the different machines, which may results in different views.
This can be an issue if the translated static text contains non Latin characters as well.
For the latin characters we provide Open Sans as a common font, this solution fails on those systems.
Is this an issue?

[jus (jus)]

@daschuer

Any difference if you change the following lines in LateNight to directly use the decimal HTML entity? :

https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/blob/1.12/res/skins/LateNight/effect_unit.xml#L45
  <Text>&#9167;</Text>

https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/blob/1.12/res/skins/LateNight/effect_unit.xml#L58
  <Text>&#9664;</Text>

https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/blob/1.12/res/skins/LateNight/effect_unit.xml#L72
  <Text>&#9654;</Text>

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

This is worst, I now get a big question mark on a yellow diamond.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

On xp the "□" remains.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

I am afraid the only solution is to replace the chars by pixmaps.

[jus (jus)]

@sblaisot
Thanks for testing. You are on win 7 iirc?

I see 2 possible solutions.

a) Works instantly: Replace button text with images, either png or svg (future proof)
b) Needs testing: Update the font-family property in the skins style definition, see e.g. https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/blob/1.12/res/skins/LateNight/style.qss#L1027

Currently we have:
``font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Open Sans Light";``

The first two fonts are the default OSX System fonts, Lucide until OSX 10.8, and Helvetica since OSX 10.9. Apple will change the default font again in OSX 11.11 (but likely keep both of the other fonts installed).

Non- OS X users wont see Mixxx with these fonts by default. Mixxx falls now back to the next generic font-family in the list, Arial (which has the < > symbols missing). Since Arial is highly likely installed on 99% of all machines, users never see the Open Sans font.

For Windows 7+ the system font is ``Segoe UI``, dunno about Win 10
So please try to change the above line to
``font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI ", Arial, "Open Sans Light";``

[jus (jus)]

Duh, stray whitespace. The last line should read:

font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Arial, "Open Sans Light";

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

I have already b) on windows: Nothing works see #8

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

Yes, windows seven on my side.

no change when replacing the font-family line. Also tried to have Segoe as the first font of the line without luck.

be carefull, "Helvetica Neue" seems to be a german localized name for "Helvetica new". Not sure it is available with that name on all locales.

Another think that can help in sorting out this bug : I installed a "Lucida Grande" TTF font on my system. The font in mixxx changed, but the lucida grande font I found didn't contain such characters.
So style font change DO work. at least for lucida grande. I suspect this is the wrong font.

Last update before posting : YEAH, I got it to work !
We have to use "Segoe UI Symbol" font. Such a shame that a system font is split accross different font names :(

WFM under W7 with the following line in style.qss#L1028 :
  font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI Symbol", Arial, "Open Sans Light";

so the issue is a matter of finding the right font-family that work on all systems. Maybe we also need to use a Symbol flavor of some other font under XP.

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

maybe "symbol" is just sufficient under windows to let the system choose the default system symbol font.
I will try it tomorrow.

@daschuer, can you try under XP with
  font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", "Symbol", Arial, "Open Sans Light";

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

Humm, no, Symbol is not a unicode font, forget about last comment.

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

Windows XP default UI font is "Tahoma".
Eject symbol (U+23CF) is NOT included in Tahoma
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/tahoma/list.htm

Segoe UI is not installed by default under XP. It comes with vista, seven, 8, 8.1 and 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe#Availability

So we need one of the following solutions :
1. Find a default windows XP font including U+23CF.
2. Ship our UI font with windows installer. maybe only for XP. Probably not really easy.
3. Switch to images.
4. Stop supporting old windows XP (i.e. don't correct this bug for XP).

@daschuer, can you open a word processor (wordpad) on your XP system, type U+23CF character in it (ALT+9167) and change font until you have an eject sign. please list all installed fonts that have that character (and if you can the ones that are default system fonts)

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

Adding "Segoe UI" before Arial on all font-family lines gives a more polished LateNight skin under Windows. It should be the preferred Windows font for UI.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

No Luck with any of the windows XP default fonts.
"Droid Sans Fallback" works but does not render that nice on Windows XP

We will suffer alignment issue, if we jump from font to font on different systems. Thats the reason why we have switched to
"Open Sans" by default. However open sans is Incomplete. It contains no Japanese characters.
Ubuntu uses "Droid Sans Fallback" (5.2 MB) as fallback.
The Simbols ◀ ▶ are rendered in different sizes throughout the different fonts.

The Japanese fall-back does not work on my German Windows XP in non of my Mediaplayers. So IMHO we can ignore the issue.

Lets do:
3. Switch to images

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

ok, made https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/pull/627 to add Sergoe UI as UI font under Windows. This makes LateNight more readable, I think.

I'm still having a strange issue where BpmContainer contains a top-padding of 4px despite padding: 0px in style.qss.
If I add in BpmTextColor1 a top-padding of -4px, this resolves the issue, but this weems weird.
any hint on where this padding comes from ?

[Sébastien BLAISOT (sblaisot)]

partially fixed (for windows vista/seven/8/8.1/10 only) in https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/pull/627

XP still missing correct symbol font.

[Owen Williams (ywwg)]

I think a decent solution for windows XP is having a special section of the wiki with a link to a free font that people can install and have it work. Segoe UI, if MS makes it available. That way we don't have to do extra work for this unsupported platform, but we give people a hand figuring out how to get in shape

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

Please lets switch to images.
Only this will guarantee that the buttons are rendered the same throughout all target systems.
Even if there is a fallback font with ◀ ▶ it may look ugly.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/commit/b591dd0524f3dd3183741d631ffa77395c0fecf8

[Swiftb0y (swiftb0y)]

Mixxx now uses GitHub for bug tracking. This bug has been migrated to:
https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/issues/8025