Bug 100900 - [Enhancement] inform user when a font style doesn't exist (bold, italic,...)
Summary: [Enhancement] inform user when a font style doesn't exist (bold, italic,...)
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Font-Substitution
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Reported: 2016-07-13 20:16 UTC by Pierre C
Modified: 2019-04-25 13:26 UTC (History)
11 users (show)

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Description Pierre C 2016-07-13 20:16:06 UTC
I'm not sure it's a good summary, feel free to correct it.

When we use font attributes there are two cases :
- the font file with the attribute exists. So the font definition is used.
- the font file with the attribute doesn't exists, so a mathematical transformation is used to display the font.

A user doesn't know, when using bold for example, if the font definition is used or if it's a mathematical transforms of the regular font.

The result of bold font is often (always) better than a mathematical transform to have a bold effect

I think that the user should be informs of what the system does.
of course, the information should be very discrete
Comment 1 Ysabeau 2016-07-26 13:54:43 UTC
It should be very useful and I agree.

The results are not the same whether the font has been designed with bold and italics or not and the bold and italics are calculated by LibreOffice. If we use Writer for DTP (and we can), for example to write a book, it is very important to have a good quality of fonts.

The other point is that, if the font is designed with bold and italics and if we want to send the file with the fonts, the weight of the file will differ and it can be critical in some cases.
Comment 2 Jean-Baptiste Faure 2016-07-29 16:18:49 UTC
Valid enhancement request. Set to new.

Could be very useful for high quality typographic work.

Best regards. JBF
Comment 3 Heiko Tietze 2019-04-12 08:38:42 UTC
Don't think users who wants to produce a high-quality result would use a font that contains no bold/italic variants.
Comment 4 Tomaz Vajngerl 2019-04-12 09:15:59 UTC
But users share the documents or use multiple computers to edit the documents and if something goes wrong with the fonts in any way (the fonts are corrupted or not detected correctly for some reason), we need to made the user aware that.
Comment 5 Pierre C 2019-04-13 07:02:52 UTC
> Don't think users who wants to produce a high-quality result would use a font that contains no bold/italic variants.

That's why they should be warned about-it.
Not easy to know if a font contains these variants.
Comment 6 kellnerp@earthlink.net 2019-04-23 15:02:41 UTC
I think Tomaz Vajngerl's comment is right on.

Users share files whether in the same office or between offices. Users may edit the files on different machines with different fonts loaded. I conclude that it isn't possible to assume much about the user skill or awareness of what is going on behind the scenes or the ability to fix something that broke between two differently configured computers were used
Comment 7 Thomas Lendo 2019-04-23 18:13:43 UTC
+1 for the enhancement request in general. Can this be done by the infobar?
Comment 8 Cor Nouws 2019-04-24 13:08:50 UTC
+1
Comment 9 Cor Nouws 2019-04-25 12:46:45 UTC
(In reply to Cor Nouws from comment #8)
> +1
Tend to change my mind on a second thought.

This requires to scan the doc, scan fonts present on the system. That's not resource-intensive?
Another question: is the idea to inform the user if a font is used, or only if a font style, not present, is used?
And should the names of involved names be mentioned too?
Rather lots of things to do/consider for situations where we must consider that the involved user should have knowledge anyway?
Comment 10 Heiko Tietze 2019-04-25 13:09:38 UTC
We discussed the topic in the design meeting. Solutions could be 

a) use icons with subtle decorations (eg. a small star at the edge when bold not included) with drawback at customization
b) add some kind of identification to the icon, eg. a frame
c) just have a tooltip "this weight is calculated"
   + icon decoration and tooltip dont work with menus (Format > Text > Bold or Style [F11] > Emphasis)
d) show an infobar when the file is loaded and fonts are included that neeed math
  + for drawback see comment 9

I'd prefer d) as we need such a solution for missing fonts (eg. "The document font Helvetica was replaced by Nimbus Sans [Review]"). It could be something like "The document font "LCD" doesn't contain bold and italic variants [More info]".

This change could be included in a bigger revamp of font substitution. See mockups at the respective tickets.
Comment 11 RGB 2019-04-25 13:17:48 UTC
(In reply to Cor Nouws from comment #9)
> Rather lots of things to do/consider for situations where we must consider
> that the involved user should have knowledge anyway?

In my experience (almost 20 years of mailing lists/forums/whatever) users tend to not know those things: I've seen too many times the situation "file F created in computer A looks different in computer B" caused by missing fonts/font styles in computer B.

In fact, we can go even further down this rabbit hole: the "Times New Roman" you can install in Linux systems through the "mscorefonts package" has completely different metrics than the "Times New Roman" of modern windows systems, to the point that they should be considered as different fonts.
Comment 12 Heiko Tietze 2019-04-25 13:22:59 UTC Comment hidden (off-topic)
Comment 13 Cor Nouws 2019-04-25 13:26:12 UTC
(In reply to RGB from comment #11)
> In my experience (almost 20 years of mailing lists/forums/whatever) users
> tend to not know those things: I've seen too many times the situation "file
> F created in computer A looks different in computer B" caused by missing
> fonts/font styles in computer B.

I agree with that. But then it's not font styles, but all font info. (Basically what Thomaz says in comment#4)
For me it's fine to change the scope of the ticket. Pierre?
And also: there may be an existing ticket already for that?