the text dialog could include warning about missing letters in fonts

[Viliam Búr]

When I write a text, sometimes some letters with accents are not displayed correctly, they do not apear in text.

In understand that this is not a problem of Inkscape, but it is very confusing for a beginning non-English user, and probably many users have encountered this problem. It would be nice to include a warning into text dialog, for example below the area where you type the texts: "Some characters may be missing in some fonts. If this happens, try using a different font."

[Alexandre Prokoudine (alexandre-prokoudine)]

Sorry, but I don't really believe it belongs to Inkscape.

1. Choice of a font is usually done in a font manager application. Most of them can show samples of alphabets.

2. Unicode fonts can have *a lot* of glyphs ---tens of thousands of glyphs. Considering this most every font existing in the world will have to be treated like a font where letters are missing.

If you are on Linux, I suggest you to install Fontmatrix or GNOME Specimen and use Text samples to get an idea what glyphs are missing for your alphabet.

[Viliam Búr (bur)]

In Inkscape the font (of text items in drawing) is selected in a dialog. It has two tabs, one displays font selection and preview, the other one allows writing the text.

A few months ago I had this problem that some letters were not correctly displayed, and I was in a big hurry, so I did not find the solution. Now it seems obvious, but at that moment I just came to conclusion that Inkscape probably does not support non-ASCII letters (which is even these days not completely unusual for some programs), so I gave up. And all I needed was to click on the next tab and think a little. (Maybe having the font selection and text input in the same tab would enlighten me.)

Also this user seems to have a similar problem:
https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/45190

So it seems to me that I have found a trivial solution for a real problem. Despite the problem is not a fault of Inkscape, it happens to Inkscape users while using Inkscape, so that could also be a right place for help (especially if it requires only adding a static text). Of course the final decision is on the authors.

[Guillermo Espertino (Gez) (gespertino-gmail)]

That's a font problem. The glyphs are missing in the font file, not in inkscape, so the problem doesn't belong to inkscape.
Anyway, the missing glyphs should be marked somehow, to make the user know that the text isn't displayed exactly how he'd expect.
And in that case, a message in the status bar should be easily missed. I think the text itself should have some kind of warning, for instance, replacing each missing character with a red outlined square with diagonals.
It's easy to find a missing character in a headline, but it's easy to miss one in a small flowed text.

I think it is a valid feature request, so I'm changing this report to confirmed and wishlist.

[tasher (taylorgasher)]

If someone has some free time and is feeling ambitious, one could even have the program compare the current font to glyphs in use and have an alert come up if any character is missing. I know this is a bit much, but I can think of more than a few times when this would have saved me, as it's pretty easy to not notice an incorrectly displayed glyph amongst a few paragraphs, even when replaced by the generic "box".

This system could be used when changing the font of highlighted text, whereas the "red outlined square with diagonals" suggested by Guillermo seems appropriate when typing characters, though it might be better if the color is defined relative to the fore- and background colors currently in use. Pasting large chunks of text falls into a somewhat grey area, however, since it is easy to miss a red X box, yet performing this check upon a text paste is a fairly specific thing...anyway, just a few thoughts.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Viliam Búr wrote on 2008-09-15:
> When I write a text, sometimes some letters with accents
> are not displayed correctly, they do not apear in text.

Likely fixed in current trunk for Windows builds (apparently, font substitution for missing glyphs works with Windows builds too, if they are not configured to use the win32 backend of pango; see also bug #647736, bug #1131760).

Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote on 2009-08-24:
> (…) the missing glyphs should be marked somehow, to make the
> user know that the text isn't displayed exactly how he'd expect.

See also:
- Bug #628190 "Automatic transparent overlay for missing glyph substitution”
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/628190>

@JazzyNico, Kris - could you test the original part of this report with current Windows builds?

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Tested on Windows XP, Inkscape trunk revision 12195.
Font substitution seems to work (but since I'm not fond of fancy fonts, I have tested with a limited sample) and the missing glyphs are replaced with the ones from a fall-back font.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Closing - Windows builds of the current stable release support rendering glyphs missing in the current font with ones taken from fallback fonts: this fixes the underlying issue of the original report (which AFAIU was specific to older Windows builds using the win32 backend of pango).

A more specific request how to notify users about replaced glyphs as described in comment 4 is tracked in bug #628190.