Fonts are not rendered (impacts output quality)

[furgo16]

While a list of available system fonts is displayed whenever there is a font selector in the GUI, selecting any given font does not seem to have any effect. The font remains always the same.

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a new document and select the Draft workbench
2. Create a text annotation (T, E)
3. With the text selected, go to the View tab in the Combo View panel
4. Change the Font Name property: select any font from the combo box

Expected:

• The text annotation is displayed in the selected font

Actual:

• The text annotation is always displayed in the default font

[furgo16]

Asked for help on the Snapcrafters forum: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/fixing-fonts-on-the-freecad-snap/40026

[soumyaDghosh]

@furgo16 Can you kindly share some logs by running the app from the terminal?

[furgo16]

@soumyaDghosh thanks. Are you looking for something specific? There is not much of an output running from the terminal and following the steps to reproduce:

freecad
FreeCAD 0.22.0, Libs: 0.22.0devR37472 (Git)
© Juergen Riegel, Werner Mayer, Yorik van Havre and others 2001-2024
FreeCAD is free and open-source software licensed under the terms of LGPL2+ license.
FreeCAD wouldn't be possible without FreeCAD community.
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Adding snap-specific PYTHONPATH to sys.path: $HOME/snap/freecad/common/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages:/snap/freecad/1031/lib/python3.10/site-packages:/snap/freecad/1031/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
Qt: Session management error: Could not open network socket
This version of FreeCAD (0.22-37472) is not compatible with Assembly4
You may encounter erors, it is rather suggested to use the stable 0.21 branch
connect failed: No such file or directory

[soumyaDghosh]

Can't find any snap specific logs! @chennes @ppd I think this is something with paths or similar. Please kindly look into this.

[furgo16]

Information on how to add font support to snaps seems inexistent, or at least I'm unable to find it. The closest I found was this comment from a bug report:

Workaround for this issue:
(in apps section)
apps:
some_app:
command: some_app
environment:
XDG_DATA_HOME: $SNAP/usr/share
FONTCONFIG_PATH: $SNAP/etc/fonts/conf.d
FONTCONFIG_FILE: $SNAP/etc/fonts/fonts.conf

Of course this only works in devmode. After switching to strict mode program in snap ends with error that it can't reach /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file. I think should be resolved by adding interface.

These environment variables are not defined in FreeCAD's snapcraft.yaml file. On my system:

• /snap/freecad/etc/fonts/conf.d is empty
• /snap/freecad/etc/fonts/fonts.conf does not exist.
• $HOME/snap/freecad/common/.cache/fontconfig/ has lots of files in it

Digging deeper, it seems that fonts should be handled by the kde-neon extension, as defined in snapcraft.yaml

[furgo16]

Related: https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=72407

[furgo16]

Also related (though I'm not sure if it still applies): https://www.chalk-ridge.com/freecad-snap-package-font-problems-fix/

[luzpaz]

What's the status here ?

[furgo16]

Still an issue. It's my most wanted bugfix with the snap package. It means providing architectural or technical drawings that look minimally professional with an appropriate font is not possible.

Questions on the snapcraft forum remained unanswered, so it seems there are no fonts experts around to help with this one.

I can only guess that the kde-neon extension or one of its dependencies should take care of font rendering. But despite spending quite a lot of time trying to understand how it works, it remains a black box to me.

[marekmarecki]

TechDraw workbench does not seem to have this problem, so the application in general has access to host system fonts (actually, I don't know if these are host fonts or packaged fonts, but it doesn't matter). The problem may be more nuanced? Maybe debugging the Draft workbench would provide some info, but I don't know how to do that

[luzpaz]

@Roy-043 would you have any idea why Draft and TechDraw differ on this issue?

[Roy-043]

I have no idea.

[furgo16]

Probably not related, but as another font-related data point: FreeCAD/FreeCAD#9458