Inkscape does not handle some fonts styles well

[Denis Moyogo Jacquerye]

Inkscape mixes Fonts that have style other than that listed in one of its source file, i.e. "Demi", "ExtraLight", "Heavy", etc. are mixed with "Book", "Bold", etc. in the font selector and in documents in various ways.

DejaVu Sans Bold Oblique SVN has a fix specifying the style to be "Bold Oblique" which works with Inkscape, but ExtraLight will need a fix in Inkscape.

Update: changed the bug summary, any font that has a style name not matchinginkscape's list will be messed up.

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

Thanks for the report.

Could you provide a small screenshot illustrating this problem, please?

[Denis Moyogo Jacquerye (moyogo)]

DejaVu ExtraLight is selected but does not trigger a change of font in practice. The text object still is with DejaVu Book.

This will happen with any font that has a style not in inkscape/src/libnrtype/FontFactory.cpp, i.e.: Regular, Roman, Normal, Plain, Medium, Book, Italic, Oblique, Slanted, Bold, Caps.
This leave a lot of professional and amateur fonts unusable with Inkscape.

Other Pango/Gtk+ applications can handle some style variants better, but still not all. Inkscape should handle the same variants.

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

Upstream bug:

http://tinyurl.com/pu28p

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

I can confirm this is still the case in Inkscape 0.44-1ubuntu1 in Edgy.

To reproduce this:
* add a text element.
* Open the fonts dialog
* Select the dejavu font.
* Select the book style, observe the preview.
* Select the "extralight" style, observe that the preview is the same as book.
* For a control, select the bold, or oblique styles, and note that the preview is different for these.

The expected behaviour is that the extralight style should be different. To demo the difference, run OpenOffice.org, and using the format->character menu, select dejavu, and then both extralight and book, and the difference will be clear.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

We've uploaded a preview release of Inkscape 0.46 to Hardy - can you check if you can reproduce this bug on Hardy's inkscape?