RE: [XaraXtreme-dev] Substituted fonts and Bug 1057

[Martin Wuerthner <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In message <5056CBC646CB4047BB26120F4377DB719BA4A0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
>
          "Charles Moir" <CharlesM@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I'm not sure of the current behaviour actually. Works fine for me, but I
> have Arial installed.
> 
> Is this too painful for others, who do not have Arial installed) on the
> current 0.5 RC ?

It just looks odd because on a system without Arial installed the font 
displayed when you first switch to the text tool is "?? Arial 
(missing)" while all the text you type is displayed in whatever font 
the system substitutes for Arial, which, on a default setup, does not 
necessarily look anything like Arial. The user has no way of finding 
out which font is actually used for rendering to substitute the 
missing Arial font.

In case the default system substitution is not a Helvetica-like font 
(and unfortunately, on something as common as a vanilla SUSE setup, it 
is not), then this means that users create documents with text set in 
"Arial" that was created using a font that had completely different 
metrics. On such a system it would probably be better if any other 
"real" font was used instead.

If we changed the default font to whatever "sans-serif" resolves to, 
you can still get "Arial" if you have it installed and you have 
configured it to be your preferred "sans-serif" font, but others could 
get other fonts.

Actually, if you think it should be Arial in preference to other fonts 
we could even check whether Arial is installed and, if so, use it and 
if not, resolve "sans-serif" and use whatever font it is mapped to.

Martin