Ticket #4041 - Lost navigation cube labels

[leong]

Wouldn't the system substitute the font with another if it can't find Helvetica?

I would think so, but it never did for me and this workaround fixed the issue for me in that the navigation cube has readable labels and never did prior to my installing the font. Even when I first reported this, Ubuntu users did not have the problem and there has been no suggestion of another solution that worked for me.
Maybe it is related to my distro or to the qt version on my system.
For me for now I can see nav cube labels and that works for me. I leave it to wiser heads to find the underlying cause and fix it at some point.
Thank you.

[openBrain]

I doubt that is the problem since the text shows perfectly here for me and as far as I can tell I don't have Helvetica on this system, at least not that I can find. Wouldn't the system substitute the font with another if it can't find Helvetica?

Definitely it substitutes.
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qfont.html#details (2nd paragraph)
The fact is that depending on the fonts that are installed on your system, in case Helvetica isn't available, you'll get one or another among the available ones.

[leong]

It did substitute except in the Nav Cube. Everything else worked.
I can't explain why then, but adding the font fixed the issue with the Nav cube for me.
Not having Helvetica was never a problem in the past.

[openBrain]

It did substitute except in the Nav Cube. Everything else worked.
I can't explain why then, but adding the font fixed the issue with the Nav cube for me.
Not having Helvetica was never a problem in the past.

I guess in your case, font substitution algorithm didn't found any "similar font" and just failed.

[leong]

I guess in your case, font substitution algorithm didn't found any "similar font" and just failed.

So it would seem, though the rest of the app had no problem substituting another font for the other parts of the app.
It works now and that is the end of it for me.

[onekk]

A rough substitution according to this page:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Metric ... ible_fonts


Would be to hardcode, this Free (GPL3) font and include the font in FreeCAD distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_FreeFont

Alternatives could be "Liberation Font"

Usually one of them is installed in almost all Linux distribution, Helvetica could be tricky as some installation has a "bitmap font" that render it or don't have a proper fontconfig setting.

Skilled user could ever change some fontconfig rules to adapt to their taste.

Regards

Carlo D.

[Kunda1]

Issue issue #5959 is still open.