Possible mac-specific bug in svg (cairo) graphics
On 29 Jan 2009, at 15:29, Simon Urbanek wrote:
You can enable fontconfig debug using FC_DEBUG=1 -- that will at least tell you what fontconfig found.
Thanks. That's helpful.
To make things worse, FreeType on Mac is quite buggy and screws up numbering of fonts within a container which results in incorrect styles - it is something we try to work around, but if FT recognizes the wrong style we can't do anything about it.
I managed to figure this out after playing with it a bit (using the Cairo package allows you to control what font styles are used). Oddly, the CairoFontMatch() function correctly identifies a font using the normal font specs, but then the Cairo() call doesn't seem to use the same one.
From what I can see this is what happens -- the main difference between 10.4 and 10.5 is that Arial and friends are supplied as (rf- style) font suitcases in 10.4 which is what FT has trouble dealing with. In 10.5 they come as individual fonts which FT can deal with just fine.
In case other people have the same problem, I got around it by using a 3rd party utility (fontu) to separate out the faces within the Verdana font file into separate .ttf files, which were then used sensibly by CairoSVG.
I know that this is catching straws, but of one the few fonts that come as TTF in 10.4 is "Euphemia UCAS", so this will produce italic output even on 10.4:
Thanks.
Although this is a nuisance, working around bugs in 3rd party libraries on older systems is not high on my priority list, os I cannot promise anything, but maybe I'll get to it...
Of course - don't worry about it, and thanks for the help. Yan