After intensive google-ing (for years actually), I finally decided to ask someone who might help (i.e. YOU :)).

Several years ago fonts in Inkscape stopped working correctly for me. I.e. from all listed fonts only some of them were actually rendering. While font preview in the font drop-down seems to work, text in the drawing area does not look anything alike.

Deleting all settings (.inkscape and .config/inkscape) did not change this.

Interesting observation: Fonts not working in Inkscape do not show up in LibreOffice and all fonts showing up in LibreOffice do work in Inkscape.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

(Gentoo, (amd64/stable/17.1 desktop, Inkscape 1.0)

Hi IdleMaster,

I recently had a pesky issue on my Linux machine that I could not shake. I too spent about a year trying to unravel the mystery. A test with a live disk confirmed that it was not Ubuntu but rather some form of corruption or misconfiguration of parts of my OS. 

In the end the simplest solution was to re-install the machine and everything resumed to work flawlessly. It took less time to do so than it did trying to diagnose the problem.          I've found that it's best to keep the configuration of a production machine quite straight forward. I try not to load experimental scripts or software on my main machine.

If you want to report a bug you can find the information for reporting it here.

Hope your issue is resolved soon.

Hi Creativ,

thanks for the info! A reinstall is no option for me (system was installed >15 years ago and worked flawlessly ever since) and it looks like no one else has/had this problem. So it seems I need to take the time to dig a little deeper on my own then.. I was just hoping I'm not the first one with this problem and someone might have an easy fix. ;)

Cheers,

   IDLE

Hi Idle,

What OS are you using?

Warm Regards

Creativ

Hi Creativ,

Gentoo, (amd64/stable/17.1 desktop).

Cheers,

   IDLE

Hi Idle,

Figures - Linux distro's are loads more stable. It may be one of your dependencies that have issues.

Python and GTK are one of the first things I check.

Have a look at the output you get if you run Inkscape from the terminal. This might give you a clue who the culprit is.

Once you have something the reporting the bug (using the link I shared) may lead you very quickly to a solution someone found in a similar situation. I reported a bug recently and got very quick response in classifying it.

This helped me see what others tried. My bug is not fixed just yet, but there's a lot of activity around it. So I believe it soon will be. I've found a great workaround though.

You may find this interesting:

https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Tracking_Dependencies

It might also be worth trying to work out what's common between the fonts that don't appear, and how they differ from the ones that do. Things to consider:

• How were they installed? Are these fonts installed with the base system? Via a package manager? Directly downloaded?
• Are they installed to the system font directory or your user-level directory?
• What format are the fonts? Not all formats are equal, and some may not be supported by the text rendering library Inkscape uses.

@Xav, that's a great idea! I had not considered that yet. It may well be much easier to solve if it's just how the font was installed.

@IdleMaster I'd actually check out Xav's suggestion first if I where you.

Ok, it seems to boil down to PCF fonts.

They are listed in the dropdown (even with a correctly rendered preview), but then refuse to be rendered in the drawing area.

This problem goes waaay back...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/167076

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/820301  << a direct hint on what is going on

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/714859

This means Inkscape lists fonts it cannot render. Yet, this bug might not affect newer mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, as fontconfig is configured to exclude bitmap fonts.

I would nevertheless argue that it is an actual Inkscape bug to present a font selection that it cannot handle.

So this isn't a "problem solved", but a "problem understood - can work around".

Thanks to all chiming in on this!

Idle I'm delighted that this one is solved.