GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309745
font viewer fails to preview fonts
Last modified: 2014-11-22 17:53:10 UTC
Distribution/Version: Ubuntu Hoary GNOME Font Viewer fails to preview many fonts. For some nothing is shown and for others a square or other symbol is shown instead of the preview. This seems to occur mostly with symbol fonts and fonts for non-latin scripts. Nautilus is able to show a thumbnail for the fonts in question. Please see attached screenshot.
Created attachment 48793 [details] screenshot of problem
same issue here with GNOME 2.11.4
The issue here is picking an appropriate sample phrase. Currently this comes from the translation, but perhaps it shouldn't. For example, if I view a CJK font in an english locale, it would be useful to show CJK glyphs rather than the ugly latin glyphs found in such fonts. To handle this correctly, we'd probably need to base it on the language coverage of the font. I am not sure of the best way to do this.
If the sample phrase is what is causing the problem, do we really need to have it or is it just customary? Couldn't we just show the glyphs in alphabetical order? Also, I think the whole point with "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." is that is has almost all the letters in the English alphabet. Finding a similar phrase in other languages would be an enormous task for translators and I'm not sure if anyone has actually done it.
The first two rows show the latin alphabet glyphs, so the user can already see those glyphs. It is useful to display some common text so that the user can see what the font will look like after kerning, etc. While "The quick brown fox ..." contains all the english alphabet letters, this isn't necessary for a sample phrase. As for methods of picking a sample phrase, it turns out that TTF fonts can include a sample phrase (TT_NAME_ID_SAMPLE_TEXT). Depending on how common this tag is, it might be a sensible way of picking the phrase.
(In reply to comment #5) > The first two rows show the latin alphabet glyphs, so the user can already see > those glyphs. Yes, but this doesn't work for non-latin fonts (like the ones in the screenshot) that often don't have glyphs for the latin alphabet. Would it be possible to show the glyphs a given fonts actually contains instead of trying to show a predefined set like the latin alphabet?
Still occurs with control-center 2.16.1 on Ubuntu Edgy.
-> gnome-utils gnome-font-viewer has now moved to gnome-utils, reassigning.
Still happens with 3.6.2 on Fedora 18.
This doesn't happen anymore with 3.14.0 on Fedora 21.