accented characters of CM fonts not available to inkscape

[Martin Konôpka]

Binary package hint: inkscape

1.) I type in Inkscape a word with accented characters (using default font), for example Slovak words "človek" or "dĺžka".

2.) Then I try to switch the font of these words to Computer Modern, in particular cmr10, which should be the Roman shape.

3.) Only non-accented letters are switched correctly. I.e. accented letters are typed incorrectly and very ugly.

See files which I am attaching:

FILE ComputerModern_accented.svg
produced in Inkscape.

FILE ComputerModern_accented.pdf
also produced in the same Inkscape session by "save as PDF".

Both the SVG and corresponding PDF clearly show the problem with ugly typing of accented characters specific to Latin1 and Latin2 character sets.

FILE HowShouldItLookLike.pdf
I created this file in LaTeX and it shows how the accented characters and words should look like.

Please note that Computer Modern fonts are the default fonts used in TeX/LaTeX systems and for many people they are most important.

Also, although I am using an English-language desktop, I have installed also any Slovak and/or Central-European fonts etc so that the problem, with most certainty, is not caused by an incomplete installation.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: inkscape 0.47.0-2ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.42-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Sep 16 23:17:01 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: inkscape

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Confirmed on Maverick with inkscape_0.47.0-2ubuntu3

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Same problem occurs for me in Gimp. Please see attachment. Martin, please can you confirm?

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Same problem with OpenOffice (attachment).

I think it's reasonable to assume that this problem lies outside of Inkscape itself. I'm not too familiar with how font rendering is actually performed. Can anyone help?

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Also, please could you confirm that the fonts were installed from the ttf-lyx package?

[Martin Konôpka (martin.konopka)]

Thanks Alex, yes, I confirm that the cmr10-gimp.png has incorrect typesetting of accented characters.

BTW, couple of years ago there used to be (visually) similar problem in OpenOffice.org. It was not related to Computer Modern fonts however; if affected default fonts (and some others too, I think). That time it was easy to cure by loading missing fonts (which were not installed by default).

PS I will try to recheck the other inkscape-related issue ASAP, hopefully today.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Alex Valavanis wrote on 2010-09-17:
> I'm not too familiar with how font rendering is actually performed. Can anyone help?

Don't know how typesetting of the accented characters is done in LaTeX, but wrt to Inkscape: if a certain font does not contain the specific Unicode symbol / character, the font backend substitutes it from a different (fallback) font (if available) -> the reporter should probably first verify whether the TTF files of the mentioned fonts actually contain those Unicode glyphs.

An quick way to test is to use gtk-demo, and preview the same words with 'Pickers > Fonts' (see attached screenshot with GTK+/X11 2.24.13, fontconfig 2.9.0, freetype 2.4.10, pango 1.30.1, and the cmr10 font downloaded from [1]).
Fontforge can also be used to view the list of available glyphs of a font - it doesn't show any accented characters either for e.g. the TTF font cmr10.

Likely the ComputerModern Unicode fonts [2] could be used as an alternative (they do include lots of accented characters).

Proposing to close as 'Invalid' for Inkscape.
-----
[1] <http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/ttf-lyx>
[2] <http://cm-unicode.sourceforge.net/>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.