GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 675781
Text tool: symbol fonts are not rendered correctly
Last modified: 2016-11-21 11:21:31 UTC
Certain fonts in the windows 2.8 release no longer render correctly. They seem to fallback to Sans Serif. I've noticed Wingdings, but I think others have mentioned Times New Roman. This seems to be a new regression as it is working in 2.7.6 and I *think* 2.8rc
*** Bug 677976 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Someone just started a thread of this at GIMPChat. Thought this would be submitted already. I too don't see the proper rendered font when chooses these fonts (Wingdings/ Webdings). :) http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5396
Some fonts (like Andalus and Asian fonts) contain language specific and arabic characters, so pressing the A key will show an A etc. You can find this out with the Windows character map. Confirming this for pure symbol fonts like Wingdings, Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3 and Symbol. Gimpchat users also report this for GIMP 2.6. I suppose the reason is in the underlying font renderer library Freetype 2. The native Mac build is also affected. Interestingly the symbol fonts don't render well in other Mac applications, too. OS X uses Freetype 2, version 2.4.4. [1]. The site [2] tells that is fixed in Freetype 2, version 2.4.8 or 2.4.9-2, so a library update could perhaps fix this. [1] http://www.apple.com/opensource/ [2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=137638
Thought this one would be patched by now, but even in 2.8.4, the bug still exists in Windows for GIMP 64-bit anyway. Just posted this thread at GIMPChat and had to use Windows Paint to create the Pi symbol; sad indeed. :) http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6690&start=0
If Freetype 2.4.8 is binary compatible with previous versions, then this could just be swapped out and tested on an installed GIMP - Lyle, maybe you want to try this yourself?
Yeah, but I rather have the fonts rendered correctly in GIMP with the text dialogue option. :)
That's what updating the Freetype2 library could achieve.
OK; tried to replace the freetype6.dll file with the one from the official site but to no avail. I then tried to place the freetype.exe (PhotoComix sourced this one a few year ago) and it would render some fonts spot on, but show only boxes for the symbol font. Oh well. :)
And the file you got from the official site was at least 2.4.8?
No; the only available compile was 2.4.2 for Windows systems and I don't know how to compile these for myself (tried to figure this Greek out a while back but my past was in Hardware Electronics Engineering and in school, just milked my way through the software side; lol). :)
As a side note, samj compiled the last version of the GIMP plugin freetype for 64-bit which is cool (thanks samj); still, the underlying issue is with GIMP's render engine (believe that involves several dlls not just freetype6.dll; not sure how many files to replace all and don't want my version of GIMP to crash) so it still doesn't render the font for Symbol or Webdings right. :) http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6653&p=83988#p83953
Note that you can't expect the freetype DLL to fix anything if it is an older version. Also, the freetype plug-in has got nothing to do with this problem.
Yeah; figured as much Michael. Will wait and hopefully the programmers can figure this one out. :)
Using the 2.4.12 from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/openSUSE_12.3/noarch/ doesn't seem to fix the problem, though - Sven, the second link in comment #3 is about a rather specific error message by ghostscript. Are you sure that this is the same problem?
*** Bug 702096 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Does this still happen in current master or the latest GIMP 2.8?
Just check; Symbols now render correctly in GIMP 2.8.18. Looks like this incident can be closed. Thanks to whoever fixed this issue. :)
Thanks, probably fixed by an upgrade of cairo or fontconfig or whatever :)
Verified with Gimp 2.8.16 on Windows 7. Thank you.