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Problems with fonts in Windows

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Guilherme Vieira

20 Nov, 2023 02:01 PM

I have two problems dealing with fonts in NodeBox 3 on Windows.

1. Some TTF fonts installed on my computer do not appear in the program. Is there any other specification I need to know besides the font format being TTF?

2. In the font menu the option "dialog.plain" appears several times, this makes it difficult to find the correct font as the selection menu is very small.

Does anyone else have these problems? Did you manage to get around it somehow?

Thanks!

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by john on 20 Nov, 2023 08:42 PM

   

   Hi Guilherme,

   I have no idea why some of your system fonts are not appearing in the Nodebox menu. I am not a Windows user and know little about the intricacies of font installations. Do you see any common pattern in the fonts which are excluded?

   I am adding Frederik in the faint hope he might have some insight.

   Yes, selecting fonts from that tiny font list in the textpath node is MADDENING. This is a pet peeve of mine, not just in Nodebox, but everywhere. In almost any user interface, developers often give little thought to the width of an input field, typically leaving that width at the default value. The amount of human misery this causes, repeated millions of times every minute of every day all over the planet is mind boggling. Yet the developer could end this nightmare IN A FEW SECONDS by simply widening the damn field. There is almost always oodles of wasted space for the field to expand into. ARRG!

   Anyway, if you are DESPERATE, I have attached a desperate solution.

   You can use the font_table node from the Cartan Node Library to list all the fonts available to Nodebox and widen the display on the left to your heart's content (use data mode and widen both columns). You can then scroll down until you find the font you want, enter its index number into a slice node, lookup the font name from the table, and feed that into your textpath node. See screenshot for an example.

   The font_table node does require an external Python library, font_table.py (included in zipped demo), so you will need to add that code library to your Nodebox file. And if you change the fonts in your system, the index number you entered may extract a different font, so you would have to keep an eye on that. And if you share your Nodebox file, anyone using it would retrieve a different font than what appears on your system.

   So this technique is only useful for personal projects when you are desperate enough to go to this extra bother. But at least it's an option.

   I suppose you could also try to figure out how to shorten the font names in your system. There is probably some way of doing that, but I would not recommend mucking about with things that may have far ranging effects elsewhere in your system.

   Sorry I couldn't be of more help. If there are any font mavens out there with other suggestions, please jump in!

   John

   • font_picker_screenshot.png 283 KB
   • font_picker.zip 2.59 KB
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2. 2 Posted by Guilherme Vieir... on 21 Nov, 2023 10:45 AM

   

   Hello John,

   This file will help me a lot when selecting fonts in the future!

   With the file I was able to see which fonts are just as Dialog in the family name and they are mostly fonts coming from Adobe's Creative Cloud or from my font manager FontBase, there are only a few that are installed directly on the system that appear as Dialog.

   It seems to me that it is a Java problem to get the font family names.

   Thanks

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3. 3 Posted by Guilherme Vieir... on 21 Nov, 2023 11:03 AM

   

   I was using an online service to convert the font from OTF to TTF. I now tried using FontForge and it worked. I have no idea why but I imagine it was something related to the way the family name information was converted.

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4. Support Staff 4 Posted by john on 22 Nov, 2023 09:33 AM

   

   Mystery solved. I'm glad it all worked out.

   Thanks for the update.

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