I have a fairly old script, that I have used extensively in the past, which uses the SQUID components Font and Text Curves to create font outlines in Grasshopper.
Now I noticed that for some fonts it does not render the correct outlines. It looks like it is just rendering Arial as a fallback.
I am getting the name of the font from Font List, so it should be correct and works fine for most fonts, but not for the one in question: Univers 93 Extended Black. We have the regular purchased version from Linotype, which is an .otf file:
I am bumping this thread, as it is still unresolved.
I simply can’t render a .otf font properly in Grasshopper any more. This used to work fine.
Both SQUID and Nautilus are both producing the same result, by rendering some fallback font (probably Arial). I am also a bit surprised that neither plugins show any kind of error information as to why it is using the fallback.
I am really stuck on this one as I don’t even know where to begin debugging this. None of the components show any error.
Rhino renders the font correctly. Any other graphical program like Figma, Illustrator, etc. all render the font just fine. So it must be something with the way Grasshopper reads/uses fonts that is broken.
We have a whole business built on a couple of Grasshopper files to produce sculptures with this font, so we are very reliant on it working correctly. I really don’t know what to do any more. I am already just using Rhino 7. squid-nautilus-font-bug.gh (22.3 KB) UniversLTStd-XBlackEx.zip (22.7 KB)
Thanks for checking it with your plugin. I love those plugins that just came out of necessity and solve some of the problems that weren’t easy to solve with other plugins.
Hello
I am not sure for others, but in Nautilus uses that, nothing special just the uses of Rhinocommon.
Rhino.DocObjects.Font font = new Rhino.DocObjects.Font(face, fontWeight, fontStyle, underlined, strikethrough);
TextEntity text_entity = new TextEntity...
Very strange then, that it would work in Rhino, but not Grasshopper. Especially now that it is working again after re-installing the font.
Fonts are of course their own complex topic, especially when it comes to “real” font families. A “normal” font has its own variants, usually italic, bold and underlined, although that is more of an added property, inside one file. But real font families don’t have those variants inside the font file, but instead have individual font files for each style. That is also the case with Univers. It has around 30 or so variants, each of which is a separate file.
It’s usually those proper font families that cause issues, because they work slightly differently. Lots of software tools struggle with them, because now you can’t just show “Univers” as the font and then have bold and italic as options. Now you either need to show all fonts individually, meaning you have like 30 entries for Univers, like “Univers 11 Light”, “Univers 12 Light Italic”, etc. Or you just show the font families, but then need a 2nd dropdown to select the style.
Graphical software (Figma, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.) can of course all handle these proper font-families, but a lot of other tools do not.
I am pretty certain this handling of different types of fonts was the problem here, but somehow re-installing helped.
