false warnings which say : Pango-WARNING **: couldn't load font "etc..." [Win32]

[Alvin Penner]

running Windows XP, this is a recent development in trunk, since 0.48.4.

on my XP computer, Inkscape recognizes a total of 114 font families when loading.

Of these 114 fonts, there are 46 warnings which say:

(inkscape.exe:2108): Pango-WARNING **: couldn't load font "MS Serif 10, etc, etc", falling back to "Sans 10", expect ugly output.

Of these 46 warnings, 17 are true in the sense that these fonts truly do not work, and 29 warnings are false in the sense that these fonts actually do work properly.

The 29 false warnings were confirmed to be false by using the text tool at the left edge to select these fonts and by confirming that the font face actually did change appropriately when the font was selected. Therefore these 29 warnings should not have occurred.

The 17 true warnings were confirmed to be true by noting that selecting these fonts just gave a default font face. Also, the routine font_instance::Ref in the file FontInstance.cpp printed out the wrong font face name when these fonts were selected. Typically it would print out "Verdana 512" regardless of which font face was selected in this case. Also, for these 17 fonts, the font viewer "dp4 Font Viewer 2.0" (http://www.fontviewer.de) was not able to load or view the font file, indicating that the problem with this font was not unique to Inkscape.

It would be nice to eliminate the 29 false warnings, since they are misleading.

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

just writing to indicate that the 17 fonts that fail are not outline fonts. They return 0 from the call to IsOutlineFont() in the routine font_instance::InstallFace in the file FontInstance.cpp. They are subsequently replaced with the font 'sans-serif' in line 987 of the file FontFactory.cpp. See the line that says:
PANGO_DEBUG("falling back from %s to 'sans-serif' because InstallFace failed\n",tc);

For these 17 fonts the warning messages are justified; for the other fonts, not.

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Confirmed on Windows XP, Inkscape trunk revision 12387, with Fontin sans and Vivaldi fonts variants.

[Beluga (buovjaga)]

Does this happen on more modern Windowses and the latest Inkscape?

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Reproduced on Windows 7, lp:inkscape/0.92.x rev. 15071.

All script fonts (Vivaldi, Palace Script MT, Brush Script MT...) are affected.
Note that they show correctly on canvas, but NOT in the Text and font dialog (fallback to sans-serif).