When this package is installed, the Helvetica font (a very, very
common font in svg files) becomes broken, mostly showing whitespace,
not kerning at all etc. This happens in inkscape, but probably also in
other applications.

Since xfonts-bolkhov-75dpi is a russian font, breakage on latin script
is not really surprising, but could the name of the cyrillic helvetica
be changed to something else, so that this won't happen? I spent a
considerable amount of time trying to find out what's wrong with
inkscape.

Teemu

tags + moreinfo
thanks

I tried this but I can not see any bitmapped font in the font menu of
inkscape.  Do you have a PostScript or TTF font for Helvetica?

This font package is not much different to the default X fonts - it
supports both Cyrillic and Latin symbols and most of the default X
fonts also support both Cyrillic and Latin symbols.  Perhaps the
problem you observed is not connected with this particular font
package?  Please test if the packages xfonts-75dpi and
xfonts-75dpi-transcoded will also cause this bug to appear.  Please
tell me if you know what I should do in order to reproduce this bug on
my system.

Anton Zinoviev

You're right, if I install either xfonts-100dpi or xfonts-75dpi, then
the Helvetica font appears on the Inkscape menu, but the font displays
the problems I described in the previous mail. If I remove both of
these packages, Inkscape does not find any Helvetica font in my
system.

Perhaps this is a bug in Inkscape, at least other Gnome programs such
as gedit seem to work with the Helvetica bitmap font just fine...

Teemu

This can be espected because Inkscape is a vector-based drawing
program.  Such programs require scalable fonts (PostScript, TTF) and
can not use bitmapped fonts.  As far as I know Debian doesn't provide
scalable Helvetica font.

In my opinion Inkscape should not show any bitmapped font in its menu
regardless of what packages are installed.  If you agree I will
reassign this bug to inkskape.  Otherwise we should close it.

Anton Zinoviev

reassign 385167 inkscape
retitle 385167 Should not show the bitmapped fonts in the font menu or should be be fixed to be able to work with such fonts
thanks

Done.

Anton Zinoviev

tags 385167 moreinfo
thanks

Hi Teemu,

I am looking through some of the old bugs reported against the Debian
package of Inkscape.  Please could you let us know if you are still
experiencing the problem you reported, in which an unusable bitmap
helvetica font appears in the font menu in Inkscape?

I am unable to test this easily, because I am using Ubuntu, in which
bitmap fonts are disabled by default.

Thanks,


Alex

From what I can see, version 0.47.0-2+b1 of inkscape (Debian) displays
the bitmap fonts in its font sellection menu if these fonts are not
disabled.  However, nothing bad happens if the user chooses a bitmapped
font -- in this case inkskape falls back to a scalable font.  It would
be better to remove completely the bitmapped fonts from this menu, but
the current behaviour is also acceptable (in my opinion).

You can remove temporarily /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf if
you want to enable the bitmap fonts.  In Debian these fonts are also
disabled except for the Terminus font.  I suppose in Ubuntu the Terminus
font is also allowed (package xfonts-terminus) as this font is still
useful for terminal emulators (xterm, etc.) and text editors (Emacs,
gedit, etc.).

Anton Zinoviev

Hi Anton,

Thanks very much for the extra info (and for teaching me something
about font handling!).  I can now confirm this in
inkscape_0.48.1-0ubuntu1

After removing 70-no-bitmaps.conf and installing xfonts-terminus, I
can see the "Terminus" font in the Inkscape fonts dropdown list.
However, when I attempt to select it, Inkscape falls back to the
default Sans.

Thanks,


Alex