Still showing an uninstalled font

[Jen Allen]

I uninstalled a font this morning. Closed Inkscape. Reopened Inkscape. It is still showing that font. I made sure to remove the font from my font manager (MainType) AND my system (in the Control Panel: Appearances & Personalizations: Fonts).

[Jen Allen (loopyjen)]

So I uninstalled Inkscape and reinstalled it. I loaded a font. It is not showing the font correctly on the screen!!! It is still showing the old font (that had the same name) on the screen when I type, but the correct font when I click on the "Text & Font" option!!

[TylerDurden (8thrule)]

This is mostly a windows issue... deleted fonts aren't really deleted. There are zombie copies of the font still hidden in the directory.

They are odd duplicates with fontname_n.ttf and the permissions are all clobbered up. Even with administrator privileges, they can't be renamed/deleted/moved via windows, without reg hacking and whatnot.

Unlocker won't do it.

To even see the font(s), one needs to use explorer as a network access to \\COMPUTERNAME\C$\Windows\Fonts\. ("COMPUTERNAME" is whatever yours is.) These are not typical hidden files, which can be shown with a directory (folder) setting.

You can also use the command prompt to navigate to, and display the contents of the font directory: (dir |more)

I used the command-prompt launched as administrator to delete.

Would be nice if the windows builds of Inkscape ignored these zombie fonts like LibreOffice does, but ... bigger fish to fry.

Would be even nicer if Windoze would work right with the permissions.

I'd use the command prompt as administrator or a linux rescue cd to delete the hidden zombie files in the fonts directory.

TD

[Hachmann (marenhachmann)]

(cross linking to question asked by same user: https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/661481)

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

FWIW I'm not able to reproduce this issue (Windows 10 x64). If I delete a font from "C:\Windows\Fonts" it's typically gone. Only exception were some font's with non-ASCII characters in file name I experimented with some time ago.

One thing that can be tried (if it's the issue Tyler describes it won't help, though) is to delete the font cache which can be found in the folder
  %localappdata%\fontconfig\cache
which will force Inkscape to re-create it (in case it got corrupted for some reason or could not be updated)

If that does not help there's not much we can do, though, and it should either be carried upstream to fontconfig devs or (as they probably should not be bothered with Microsoft quirks either) to Microsoft themselves...

[Eric (ewnl)]

Deleting
  %localappdata%\fontconfig\cache
has no effect whatsoever.

Sure, a reboot helps.

Don't misinform people that this is an issue with Windows. Windows works brilliantly, look at Office for an example wrt font installations/deletions/updates.

This is not a Microsoft/Windows quirk, this is Inkscape (or its dependency) misbehaving. Inkscape is littered with this kind of bugs and major usability issues. As some other otherwise awesome open source software is too, by the way. Being portable is a lot of work, but commit to supporting Windows truly if at all possible. It appears in many ways Inkscape merely compiles and runs. But if you don't, be faithfull about the reason stuff doesn't work as it does on Linux, please.

If I understand it correctly, Inkscape opens .ttf files to get to system fonts. If that is true, this is just done plain wrong. Inkscape should use the proper way to get to system fonts. That the file exists on disk is completely irrelevant. Get a handle. If you then try to uninstall a font and Inkscape is open, Windows just won't do it. If you update, Inkscape will be told the font changed and be given a chance to redraw. Look at Word for the behavior I describe.

[Qantas94Heavy (qantas94heavy)]

Closing in favour of more comprehensive report in bug 1773601.

Closed by: https://gitlab.com/Qantas94Heavy