Bug 78186 - Add an easy way to know which fonts are used in a document and which of them are missing
Summary: Add an easy way to know which fonts are used in a document and which of them ...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
4.2.3.3 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsDevEval, topicUI
: 82227 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: Infobar Font-Substitution
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2014-05-02 12:31 UTC by Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Modified: 2023-11-21 12:07 UTC (History)
13 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
font list where cambria and calibri are not installed (34.39 KB, image/png)
2014-05-02 12:31 UTC, Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Details
show Cambria Regular but LibO cant access it (53.70 KB, image/png)
2014-05-03 02:42 UTC, Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Details

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Description Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-02 12:31:09 UTC
Created attachment 98336 [details]
font list where cambria and calibri are not installed

After filling bug 77910, i think it would be a good idea to have LibO show some type of indication that a particular font isnt installed/accessible by LibO. Presently i'm able to guess that a particular font isnt installed/accessible in LibO when the font isnt rendered in the list and has no anti-aliasing. A possible suggestion would be to have the font colored in red and in bold. Another possible one would be to add ' (not installed)' to the end of the font name. And another suggestion would be to highlight the background color of the font in the list in red.
Comment 1 Cor Nouws 2014-05-02 13:24:51 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 2 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-02 15:17:00 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 3 Cor Nouws 2014-05-02 18:33:52 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 4 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-02 18:55:02 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 5 Cor Nouws 2014-05-02 21:26:57 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 6 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-03 02:42:17 UTC
Created attachment 98358 [details]
show Cambria Regular but LibO cant access it
Comment 7 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-03 02:44:21 UTC
I checked that list and that unfortunately doesn't help when a font is defined in a document and isnt present/accessible on the system, as can seen in the latest attachment. Is there an easy means of see a list of fonts used by a particular document?
Comment 8 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-03 08:05:30 UTC
If possible, it would be nice if an error/notification dialog would appear after the loading of the document stating which fonts are present in the current document that are not available in LibO, with that ability to disable to notification from further occurring for those who dont wish it to appear.
Comment 9 Maxim Monastirsky 2014-05-06 17:37:12 UTC
Hi Jay,

I'm not entirely sure what do you mean. If a font is not installed on your system, then it won't appear in the font list! Moreover - if you try to type a name of a non-installed font, or open a document that uses a non-installed font, its name will appear with Italic styling (Just try to type 'NonExistFont' or other junk in the font combo box of the formatting toolbar, and press 'Enter').

In your case the font 'Cambria' considered as installed, because the Bold/Italic variants of it are TTF files, and do recognized by LO. Do you really want that fonts which don't have all the styles (Regular/Bold/Italic) would be marked in a special way? What's the use of it?
Comment 10 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-06 21:24:23 UTC
(In reply to comment #9)
> Hi Jay,
> 

Hi Maxim,

> I'm not entirely sure what do you mean. If a font is not installed on your
> system, then it won't appear in the font list! Moreover - if you try to type
> a name of a non-installed font, or open a document that uses a non-installed
> font, its name will appear with Italic styling (Just try to type
> 'NonExistFont' or other junk in the font combo box of the formatting
> toolbar, and press 'Enter').
> 

Yes i see what you mean with the font showing in italics, but how would someone not familiar with what an italicized font name know what it meant?

> In your case the font 'Cambria' considered as installed, because the
> Bold/Italic variants of it are TTF files, and do recognized by LO. Do you
> really want that fonts which don't have all the styles (Regular/Bold/Italic)
> would be marked in a special way? What's the use of it?

Yes i see now that it would be complicated to have a useful indication in the font drop down when fonts have variants and possibly one of those variants are missing. Personally, i would like to know as soon as i opened a document that a particular font or font variant was used in the document and isnt installed on my system, which would mean that i'm not seeing the file as it was originally created. It showing up as a dialog box would be great or possibly as an notification popup like IE or firefox < http://upload.macromedia.com/exchange/dreamweaver/previews/ie-ff-coolbar.jpg >, < http://davidtenser.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/popup-blocker.png >, < http://media.askvg.com/articles/images5/Addon_Ready_For_Use_Internet_Explorer_Notification.png >. Basically something that would be hard to miss, but could be disable permanently for those that dont care to have the feature.

Right now with the testing i'm doing for .docx files, i have to unzip the file, go into the xml file with the list of fonts and then make sure i have those fonts installed in order to make sure that the file will be rendered correctly. But if there was a simpler means to find out the list of fonts that are used in a particular file, that would quite helpful.
Comment 11 Maxim Monastirsky 2014-05-07 09:18:27 UTC
So let's summarize: You want some way (probably a dialog) to show a list of all missing fonts, and maybe also some kind of notification while opening the document. By 'missing fonts' you mean also a particular style that is used in the document, but isn't installed on the system.
Comment 12 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-05-07 11:08:54 UTC
Yes your summary is correct. I think the best and less annoying means to achieve the notification would be to have an error notification icon in the statusbar like in IE < http://www.tutorialspoint.com/images/error_icon.gif > and firefox < http://www.indiana.edu/~purchase/resources/img/apple2.gif > or one in the menubar similar to the update notification icon. When the user clicks on it, it would show the names of the missing fonts/font variants not available.

Ideally, i'd like a dialog to show a list of all the fonts and variants used in a document, likely added as a tab in the 'Styles and Formatting' dialog, with some type of indication of which ones are not accessible to LibO (possibly shown in italics, with tooltips mentioning that its not accessible), and with the use of a drop down menu to filter the list by 'All Fonts', 'Missing Fonts', 'Substituted Fonts', etc.
Comment 13 Cor Nouws 2014-06-22 12:55:31 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 14 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-06-22 15:55:38 UTC
(In reply to comment #13)
> And what can you read beneath the line with dropdown boxes? :)

Yes underneath the drop down it says "This font style will be simulated or the closest matching style will be used.", when normally underneath the drop down it says "The same font will be used on both your printer and your screen.", so its something the wouldnt attract user's notice of it unless it was compellingly different from what it normally is, which is why in the font drop down in the formatting toolbar, it italicizes fonts that are not available on the system. :)
Comment 15 Urmas 2014-06-22 16:38:59 UTC
Italicizing unavailable font names is bugged and unreliable, BTW.
Comment 16 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-06-22 17:36:44 UTC
(In reply to comment #15)
> Italicizing unavailable font names is bugged and unreliable, BTW.

Yes it isnt perfect as when i have text in Cambria Regular and dont have Cambria Regular installed, but i do have Cambria Italics installed, it wont italisize Cambria in the drop down menu when i select Cambria Regular text.
Comment 17 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-06-27 11:44:44 UTC
pulled from bug 80427 comment 11 - "First, there are two Asian fontfaces in the document that are not in my OSX system. I know this because I opened the file in Keynote and it is kind enough to tell me so. It even says it will replace them by TimesRoman (nice UI advantage over LO there ;-) )"
Comment 18 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-06-28 00:08:07 UTC
Seems like an infobar for missing font notification has been discussed in some way according to < https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Guidelines#Infobar >.

@Alex: could you post a screenshot of how the Keynote notification looked when you loaded the file with the missing fonts.
Comment 19 Maxim Monastirsky 2014-08-06 10:44:16 UTC
*** Bug 82227 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 20 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-08-06 12:00:36 UTC
There seems to be an infobar facility already built into LibO, as mentioned in bug 80538 for the infobar to appear when a user opens a read only file. Hope it can be used for this issue.
Comment 21 Ulrich Windl 2014-08-06 13:28:43 UTC
(In reply to comment #20)
> There seems to be an infobar facility already built into LibO, (...)

You are referring to the "next" LibreOffice generation? I have never seen an infobar in 4.1 and 4.2 (AFAIR).
Comment 22 Adolfo Jayme Barrientos 2014-08-30 19:58:09 UTC
(In reply to comment #21)
> You are referring to the "next" LibreOffice generation? I have never seen an
> infobar in 4.1 and 4.2 (AFAIR).

Ulrich, LibreOffice generations do not exist. It is developed progressively, building upon the previous versions. The infobar widget has been implemented since 2012, but so far it has been underused. Currently, you can only see it if you work with remote documents over a CMIS connection, or if you try to edit a VBA macro in LibreOffice Basic. See http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?qt=grep&q=infobar.
Comment 23 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-08-30 21:11:11 UTC
Read through your bug report Ulrich and this bug does covers all the missing font related parts of your bug.

1) indication of missing fonts (basically infobar)
2) list of document fonts and indication of which ones are missing

Liked your idea of the list of document fonts list also mentioning substitutes for missing fonts. Maybe that could be put in the missing font tooltip. :)
Comment 24 jonathon 2015-04-26 06:48:15 UTC
Is there anything that the extension TestFonts (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/TestFonts ) does not provide, that is needed to resolve this issue?
Comment 25 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2015-04-27 06:00:54 UTC
The extension does produce an output that addresses the main issues identified, and it would be great if it could be extended to show what font LO is substituting for the non-existing font.
Comment 26 Ulrich Windl 2015-04-27 07:08:58 UTC
(In reply to jonathon from comment #24)
> Is there anything that the extension TestFonts
> (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/TestFonts ) does not
> provide, that is needed to resolve this issue?

I just tried: In an old document it listed font "Conga". What I miss is to find the exact spot where it's used. When I tried the search functions, I got "Couldn't find next occurence of font 'Conga'". Maybe I'd prefer a list with hyperlinks to click on that would navigate me to the ocurrence of the missing font.
Comment 27 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2015-12-13 11:23:52 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 28 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2017-09-29 18:02:40 UTC
My proposal[1] was published on the design blog of using the infobar as the notice

https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/10/Fig1.png

and use the File > Properties dialog's Font tab to list all the fonts used in the document and which fonts are being substituted or simulated. My design is on the right and Heiko's design is on the left.

https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/10/Fig2.png

[1] https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2016/10/21/dealing-with-missing-fonts/
Comment 29 Roman Kuznetsov 2019-10-18 10:28:56 UTC
*** Bug 128226 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***