Notekit on Fedora 31 starts out with wrong or missing font about notekit

[LyesSaadi]

@maweki I've solved the issue and updated the COPR build by changing the font to serif in the package. If you want to try the update: sudo dnf update notekit --refresh.

[maweki]

The gtk font chooser is no option?

[blackhole89]

Odd. What's the output if you type locale into the same terminal that you launch it from? Does this happen immediately upon start? Could it be related to the colour palette issue in some way?

[maweki]

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

$ notekit
== This is notekit, built at Sat Oct 26 20:14:33 2019. ==
Detected paths:
Config: /home/maweki/.config/notekit
Active notes path: /home/maweki/.local/share/notekit
Default notes path: /home/maweki/.local/share/notekit
Resource path: /usr/share//notekit

color1

This is the COPR build. I'll try building from source as soon as I can.

[maweki]

I can type normally and it saves correctly but shows these numeric symbols. So maybe this is a font issue?!

[blackhole89]

The locale settings look correct. Do you in fact have a /usr/share/notekit folder with a data/ and a sourceview/ subfolder?

So if you type, save and reload what you typed, the text you typed shows up fine? The problem with the numeric symbols is that they are placeholder characters for missing glyphs, but depending on their interpretation (I'm not sure if the top line or the bottom line holds the high or the low byte respectively...), they look like placeholders for the basic ASCII plane. (e.g. $68 $74 $74 $70 is just "http"). So either we're missing a font for basic ASCII, or somehow the characters in the file got shifted by 256 (i.e. they're actually $6800, $7400, ...)

(...missing a font? Do you have the Bitstream Charter font installed? If not, can you try finding the line font: 16px Bitstream Charter; in data/stylesheet.css and replacing the font name with something that exists on your system?)

[maweki]

I can now confirm this issue on multiple, but more or less identically configured, Fedora 31 systems.

Font navigator says I do have Bitstream Charter. But if I comment out the line with the font info, then it works.

So this works but obviously with the wrong font.

#mainView {
/*    font: 16px Bitstream Charter;*/
    padding-top: 16px;
    padding-right: 16px;
    padding-bottom: 16px;
}

This is a screenshot of Fedora's font manager.

[maweki]

Okay, this gets quite strange. If I want to choose Bitstream Charter as a font for gedit, it does not appear in the chooser menu. Only bitstream vera does. Is there a way to just use the system's monospace font like gedit does when you don't choose a special one?

[blackhole89]

Since the dialog you screenshotted says it's a PostScript Type 1 font, could it be that the applications in question only support TTF and TTF-derived fonts for you? (My copy of it is also Type 1, but it came with the texlive-fonts-recommended and is accordingly in a different folder. If I had realised it came from such a niche package, I probably wouldn't have picked it as the default font.)

Could you perhaps test for me if the fallback mechanism works correctly if you replace the line in question with font: 16px Bitstream Charter, serif;? If that's the case, I could change the default stylesheet to this, so it uses the system serif font whenever Bitstream Charter is unavaiable.

[maweki]

• Using only serif leads to the following error: (notekit:4679): Gtk-WARNING **: 11:10:30.958: Theme parsing error: stylesheet.css:66:15: Using Pango syntax for the font: style property is deprecated; please use CSS syntax and then terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Gtk::CssProviderError' with a core dump
• Using 16px serif works
• Using 16px Bitstream Charter, 16px serif; directly terminates with terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Gtk::CssProviderError' and core dump
• Using 16px serif, 16px Bitstream Charter terminates the same way.
• Using the original 16px Bitstream Charter does not throw the Gtk::CssProviderError, as we know
• Splitting font into font-size (16px) and font-family: Bitstream Charter, serif; does not throw an error but also has the wrong behaviour. It looks like the font can be loaded somewhat successfully (e.g. is found) but then can't really be used.

For me this font seems to come from some X11 package. I tried a session with Xorg instead of Wayland but that didn't work either. Libreoffice does also not show Bitstream Charter as usable font. The package that provides the font for me is xorg-x11-fonts-Type1-7.5-23.fc31.noarch which I can't remove since libreoffice-base, java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel, and eclipse-swt depend on it.

So apparently this does work on other systems and it worked on fedora 30 so some library must have changed to cause this. I don't really know which project to write a ticket against and what to do about this in notekit besides just changing the font to the system one.

[blackhole89]

Thanks for checking all of these. It looks like the only ways around this problem may be to either give up on Bitstream Charter completely (something I'm reluctant to do, because it's a very nice font...), or to add special rules for Fedora somewhere (to create a custom fontconfig rule, bundle a working copy of Bitstream Charter, or have a different CSS line). I'll think about which option is the best.

[maweki]

This packaging seems to work. I'm pretty sure this will be a problem for other distributions as well but who knows which combination of packages breaks that font.

[blackhole89]

I don't know -- on my system (Debian), even entering a non-existent font just results in it rendering in the default sans-serif font (which is actually a bit of a problem too, since it makes it impossible to specify HTML-style fallback chains).

[maweki]

entering a non-existent font

apparently my issue is an existing font that is somewhat broken.

HTML-style fallback chains

have you tried it with font-family? For me the fallback works fine.

[blackhole89]

apparently my issue is an existing font that is somewhat broken.

Yeah, I understand. The question is how many distros that exact font will be present on but broken in a similar way...

font-family

Yeah. I think that for whatever reason, my system basically treats every font name as existent and fills in glyphs from default fonts as needed. (I may have done that myself long ago as a nuclear solution for some international font issue or another.)

[kaimast]

Have the same bug on Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME. I have texlive-fonts-recommended installed... Any suggestions?

[blackhole89]

What happens if you change the line near the bottom of stylesheet.css that says font: 16px Bitstream Charter to something different, say font: 16px Bitstream Charter, serif (to see if the HTML-style fallbacks work) or just font: 16px serif?

[kaimast]

Fallback doesn't seem to work. Changing to another font does.

I tried to find the Debian package that has this font but was unsuccessful so far. Maybe use a different default font?

[blackhole89]

Blegh, it's really a bummer that fallback doesn't work. Do you think it would be reasonable to bundle the font with the distribution? Bitstream Charter is nice and has a permissive license, and it seems to me that a bad default font would significantly detract from the new user experience (though of course not as much as everything rendering as tofu :))

(I think we can probably load a font from disk using FcConfigAppFontAddFile; an additional dependency on fontconfig-dev would hardly be the worst considering we already need Gtk+.)

[blackhole89]

I guess I could, but then there would be some weirdness in that the font setting of the stylesheet is the one thing that gets overridden and does nothing (by, presumably, the user config file). (I assume that trying to parse and modify stylesheet.css itself to overwrite the font setting in it would be hairy and brittle.) Also, there still would be the question of what should be the default setting...

[maweki]

Just a general family like serif?

[blackhole89]

But that does look terrible on a lot of systems (and first impressions matter...).

Do you think there's anything wrong with bundling Bitstream Charter? It's fairly compact (4x35KB or so). This would still leave open the possibility of adding a font picker to the app (and using config.json to store the setting).

[maweki]

Is there a way to choose the system default? You could also open did dialogue on first start. Bundling might also be fine, I just wonder how other apps do it, without bundling.

Maybe we read the available fonts and preselect the best one we know and fallback to either a bad one or the chooser.

But adding the font selector would be nice, independent of everything else.

[blackhole89]

Would appreciate feedback on whether this way of bundling it works (i.e. it correctly recognises the font now).

On Arch Linux (even if compiled from source) it's still broken...

I also second the suggestion from @maweki about the font selector, as I find the font size really big on my 27" monitor :)

[blackhole89]

Still broken as in... it displays the boxes as in the initial report's screenshot?

Still broken as in... it displays the boxes as in the initial report's screenshot?

Exactly.

[blackhole89]

I think we might have bumped into this issue. I have replaced the bundled Type1 fonts with OpenType versions; can you check if this fixes it for you?

Now it works (at least for me)...