No Dejavu Sans Condensed font in KDE Feisty Fawn (nor Gutsy)

[Aldin K]

Hi, as i installed ubuntu-desktop kubuntu-desktop (Feisty-Fawn Herd5), i found out that i can't choose DejaVu Condensed font for my KDE apps (btw i use this font for my clock in KDE taskbar/tray).

It is available for GNOME but in changed way, not like it was used to be...

[Aldin K (aldin)]

There goues screenshot of KDE font chooser...

[Aldin K (aldin)]

And there is GNOME screenshot...

[stivani (stivani-deactivatedaccount)]

I am also having this bug. I have installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 and upgraded to the latest available packages, and the Dejavu Condensed fonts are missing in KDE. But they are in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/

[Aldin K (aldin)]

there is more!

no DejaVuSansCondensed even in OpenOffice.org! i attached screenshot though...

anyone?

[Fabio Albieri (chareos)]

Same problem upgrading from Kubuntu edgy to kubuntu feisty.
This is a major annoyance to me, I used the condensed for toolbars and GTK apps, with excellent results. Please, please, fix

[acacha (sergi-tur)]

Same problem for me on upgraded Ubuntu Edgy to Feisty. In fact, the problem I also can't add the fonts manually.

[Holger Koch (atarax)]

Same with me on fresh Feisty installation. The Screenshot is the font-selector in OpenOffice.

[acacha (sergi-tur)]

It seems that the bug is in the files:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansCondensed-Bold.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansCondensed-BoldOblique.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansCondensed-Oblique.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansCondensed.ttf

from package ttf-dejavu because I've replaced these files with and old copy I have and after executing:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

DejaVu Sans Condensed have worked again...

May be as i can read at changelog:

ospito que han fet algun canvi que ha esguerrat aquestes fonts
(del changelog.Debian.gz):

ttf-dejavu (2.13-1) unstable; urgency=low
...
 * debian/ttf-dejavu.defoma-hints: remove "-Condensed" suffix from
   Family. Thanks to Eugeniy Meshcheryakov.

ttf-dejavu (2.12-2) unstable; urgency=medium

 * Fix incorrect font widths in condensed fonts. These caused most recent
   version of fontconfig to prefer condensed fonts over normal. Thanks to
   Eugeniy Meshcheryakov for the patch. (Closes: #401615)

Somebody introduced a bug in New Version....

You could find my old copy of the fonts at:

http://xarxantoni.net:8080/mediawiki/index.php/Com_solucionar_el_problema_de_les_fonts_de_les_transpar%C3%A8ncies_del_curs

http://xarxantoni.net/~sergi.tur/fonts.zip

[stivani (stivani-deactivatedaccount)]

I can confirm that this bug has something to do with the files mentioned above. If I use the files from acacha, the condensed fonts seem to work again. I hope there will be soon an official update for feisty that solves this problem.

[Brice Terzaghi (terzag)]

It happened to me too and it seems like non-GTK apps can't see the font variants. E.g. in Firefox, where I used to have three subfamilies for DejaVu Sans (Condensed and two others that I can't remember : maybe Condensed Oblique and Condensed Bold), I now have :
DejaVu Sans
DejaVu Sans
DejaVu Sans

If I set DejaVu Sans Condensed in the fonts config of Gnome, the font appears correctly in GTK apps but not in others (menus of Firefox, openOffice...).

[Ben Laenen (benlaenen)]

This is not a DejaVu problem. All fonts with Condensed style variants will have this behaviour in KDE (and some more programs). For full details I can direct you to http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-566403.html where I explained it completely.

There were a few small problems with DejaVu that were found as soon as Fontconfig made the switch, but that's all fixed now and all remaining problems should be fixed in the affected programs.

[Denis Moyogo Jacquerye (moyogo)]

Ben is right :-)

In short, it's your applications that don't handle font families properly. So it's a Qt and OOo bug.

[stivani (stivani-deactivatedaccount)]

This problem is still present in Gutsy

[Marcelo de G. Malheiros (mgm)]

In fact, this bug is still present on Gutsy. Overwriting the fonts from the old versions cited on comment #8 fixed the problem in all applications.

Please check this bug as it seems to be major from the end-user point of view, as the Condensed variants are already much used.

[Ben Laenen (benlaenen)]

There are three ways to get condensed fonts in KDE: fix it in Qt, work around it by removing the preferred family patch from fontconfig, or work around it by removing the preferred (sub)family tags from the DejaVu faces (or install an old version of DejaVu as the user above did, but I don't really recommend that solution) and from all other fonts you may have installed with more styles than the standard regular/italc/bold/bold italic.

upstream bug report in Qt task tracker: http://trolltech.com/developer/task-tracker/index_html?id=143304&method=entry

[Ze Mane (zemane)]

This is SO ANNOYING, even if it is to comply to some new fontconfig rules!
I want my DejaVu Condensed fonts back! In all applications!

I recently installed openSUSE 10.3 and now all my OpenOffice documents are wrong! The most recent version of DejaVu that shows the Condensed fonts in OO is version 2.8. I got it at http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Old_Downloads
The latest version can be downloaded from http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download

I looked into a Gnome application to see how to it now displays the new fonts. I opened gnome-appearance-properties, selected the Fonts tab, and clicked on the Application Font button to see how it would show the DejaVu fonts. It is terrible, there is now 9 styles to choose just in the DejaVu Sans family, plus 8 in the DejaVu Serif family. The Mono family still shows 4 styles. You can see the screnshot I took below.

I prefer the old stile, where styles were better organized by providing a Condensed family. This also allows for faster selection of the fonts because I know by reading its name that it is a Condensed font.

Please someone, have a nice solution to this problem, as soon as possible!!

Thanks.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

This isn't a Baltix bug - closing that component

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Filing into correct package and setting importance. Thanks for confirming the issue still exists with Gutsy. Does it also still exist with Hardy?

[Ben Laenen (benlaenen)]

As mentioned a few times above, not seeing condensed fonts is is a Qt issue, not a DejaVu one. Marking the ttf-dejavu component invalid.

[Bálint Magyar (balintm)]

This bug is still present in Hardy. DejaVu's Condensed variants are not shown in font lists in QT and/or KDE apps.

[Boudewijn (b-o-kubuntu-org)]

Dear all,

The problem of not being able to use DejaVu condensed fonts in KDE (or other similar fonts for that matter) simply is an absolute showstopper for me to switch over to Kubuntu. And I really, really would like to.....

As for the fact that the preferred (sub)family "patch" was made in fontconfig >= 2.4.2 in a non-configurable manner, I find this unbelievable for a package as fundamental as fontconfig. Having fontconfig evolve towards a new approach is great, but given the fact that important environments in which it is used, like KDE and Qt, are not ready for it, should have resulted in a simple configuration option for switching the "patch" on or off, at least until such time the great majority of packages support the new approach.

From what Ben Laenen wrote above and in his explanation at <http://osdir.com/ml/linux.debian.devel.fonts/2007-02/msg00007.html>, it looks like there are three solutions. Unfortunately, none of these solutions are accessible to users like me. I tried to find a version of fontconfig <= 2.4.1 for Kubuntu 8.04, but could not find one. As for the option of "fixing" each font that suffers from the problem, this is not evident for most users, and moreover, not an option for older fonts which are no longer maintained and which are either not free or not open.

Having said this all, I see only three solutions that would make the problem disappear for (potential) Kubuntu users like me:

(a) Knowing that it is not realistic to expect all packages that use (the results of) fontconfig to be fixed, release a Kubuntu-specific version of fontconfig in which the preferred (sub)family "patch" can be turned on or off by means of a configuration option. It would of course be even better to ask the maintainers of fontconfig to incorporate this in a future version, but that would require Kubuntu to switch to such updated version of fontconfig (thereby noting that Kubuntu 8.04.1 does not currently use the latest stable version of fontconfig, version 2.6.0, but uses version 2.5.0 instead).

(b) Release a Kubuntu-specific package from which the preferred (sub)family "patch" is removed (meaning that you could then choose to install either the current version or such alternative version. This solution would require two packages to be maintained though.

(c) Release the latest non-"patched" version of fontconfig, version 2.4.1, for at least Kubuntu 8.04.1, but preferably for all other maintained versions of Kubuntu.

Would any of these solutions be possible in the near future?

    Best regards,

    Boudewijn Overgaauw

[Boudewijn (b-o-kubuntu-org)]

From the explanations of Ben Laenen it is clear the problem results from a change in fontconfig, although one could argue that the problem lies in the packages using (the results of) fontconfig.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Available in 8.10 + ttf-dejavu*.

[Ben Laenen (benlaenen)]

Can you give details about how the fix for fontconfig works? Did you add a switch for enabling and disabling preferred (sub)families for example?