[SOLVED] GIMP Gothic Extras Font Family Only Displays 1 Out of 5

[Neke]

Hi!

Not sure whether this is a Linux quirk, a GIMP problem, or a "Me" problem. I do a lot of design work, so install lots of fonts for use in GIMP and Inkscape. Never had any problems adding new ones until now.

I get them free for commerical use off 1001Fonts, both OTF and TTF.

How I do it

Extract the zip folder
Go to File System-->Usr-->Share
Then Open as Root the Fonts folder
Type password
Drop Extracted Font folder into either the OTF Folder or the TTF Folder.

Usually works fine.

Problem With Gothic Extras

So, with the Gothic Extras family (5 different fonts), I go through the identical process.

When I restart GIMP, it "knows" there are 5 fonts, but it only produces the actual characters for one of them, the first one it encounters.

In the Fonts Folder, they are labelled "GothicExtras_A", "GothicExtras_B", "GothicExtras_C", etc

And by the time they are in the Fonts dropdown in GIMP, they show up as just "Gothic Extras", "Gothic Extras #1", "Gothic Extras #2", etc

I tried changing the underscores in the file names to dashes (the Lato font family has loads of fonts which work fine, but have dashes). Didn't make any difference.

What Works?

I found that if I wanted to use Gothic Extras B, for example, if I drag that single font out of the gothicextras folder and into the parent OTF folder, that works. But I can't drag all of them out, to get access to all of them. It just goes back to picking the first one (font A).

Weird. I mean, maybe it's even a problem with font data or something. I'm not an expert on any of this. I just grab fonts and drop them into my font folders, generally without any issues.

Any help appreciated. Hopefully, I have given enough info for somebody to know what's going on. BTW, the other fonts (B, C, D and E) just show up as generic default GIMP alphanumeric fonts - the Gothic Extras are text "ornaments" rather than alphanumerics.

Thanks!

[Neke]

Some extra bits and pieces I've managed to find out.

First, Inkscape is the same as GIMP, so it will only show actual characters for the A font, but not B, C, D or E.

Funnily enough, LibreOffice Writer defaults to only showing font E, but not A, B, C or D.

I tried dropping the font folder into the GIMP specific font folders. Not ideal, as I figure why not have the fonts available to other software. In any case, it didn't work.

So I converted the OTF files into TTF to see if that might be the problem. It wasn't. Same problem.

From this GIMP forum, one of the Mods mentioned Scribus being picky with fonts (post 7 on the thread).

http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6615

So I tried Scribus, and hey presto - all 5 fonts work fine on that software.

And that led me to what might be the sad conclusion that it's general bugs across loads of software in how they handle fonts, where there is more than one in the family (not sure why Lato works fine, though). I think the responder on this Github thread thinks this is the case, as he responded to somebody who appeared to have a similar problem to mine, albeit with a different font-family.

https://github.com/TheRobotFactory/Eigh ... s/issues/1

Not sure where to go, now, to be honest. With Scribus handling all 5 fonts fine, it doesn't seem to be a Linux quirk; more likely to be a GIMP, LibreOffice and Inkscape set of quirks - or maybe there's something up with the font metadata, maybe. I downloaded Fontforge. The guy in the Github thread mentioned it might be possible to load the fonts into Fontforge and alter the Family Name, so they're no longer connected to each other, and they'll stop confusing GIMP.

I suppose I'd better think about learning how to use Fontforge. Tomorrow though - it's getting on for 4am here (so not tomorrow, just later today. lol).

If anyone's got any ideas to help, I'm all ears.

[Neke]

Yay! Finally, I figured out the solution - or rather, I found it, after a ton of digging around.

This appears to be a font problem, or possibly a problem with how certain software (incl GIMP) understands fonts and font family variations.

So rather than continuing to mess about inside usr-->share--.>fonts and changing stuff there, I ended up installing Font Manager, which showed the fonts that work (eg Lato) have all the variations as separate non-connected fonts in their own right - each as a single variation.

The ones with the problem showed up nested underneath each other as a "Family" - so for example, the one I just experimented with and fixed was called the Miracle font, with two variations.

It means installing FontForge, tinkering with the PS Name and TTF Name, and then re-generating the font from scratch and installing it in the shared (or individual user) fonts folder. Then refreshing GIMP did the rest.

Painful to figure this out, mainly because I didn't know whether the problem was a glitch in Linux, or GIMP, or the fonts themselves. (Some of the fonts are paid-for pro fonts too, so I'd have expected their name details to be correct, and they were not.)

Anyway, rather than reproducing the solution here, for anybody else who might need to fix the same problem, I'll post the references:

This forum post summarises the problem and why it happens, and what to do about it, without actually giving a detailed step-by-step (esp relating to how to use FontForge):

http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18802

And this pair of tutorials shows actually the opposite of what is needed, but in enough detail that you just kind of do the opposite of what he says. (He wants to group a bunch of fonts under a single font family; whereas I needed to completely disassociate font family members from each other!)

https://www.fonttutorials.com/how-to-name-font-family/

AND

https://www.fonttutorials.com/how-to-fi ... -your-font

Hope this helps anyone else doing graphic design work in GIMP and scratching their heads about why some fonts show up and other same-family members are just showing up as default sans fonts.

I'll mark this one as SOLVED.