[solved] OSX and missing font for QCAD

[52buickman]

What font is being used by QCAD in the "About" dialog window? It seems to be missing on my OSX 10.11.6 (El Capitan). I'm running the latest QCAD (v3.24.3). I suspect this isn't a bug with QCAD, but an issue with my OSX which was originally installed as "Leopard" and upgraded with successive upgrades until El Capitan. I'm figuring something fell out in the upgrades. I've attached a screenshot of the problematic dialog window.

[52buickman]

Looking at this problem more and understanding OSX font handling, it appears that the Qt packaged with the QCAD OSX install is lacking a resource font in Qt. This might be a legitimate "bug" with the QCAD installation. Another set of eyes to get perspective if this is a "personal problem" or not is welcomed.

[andrew]

Do you have "Arial" installed?

[52buickman]

Arial did not exist. I loaded in arial.ttf "regular" from the Win97 font package and the font validated on OSX. I rebooted and opened QCAD. The fonts are still not rendering in the About dialog box.

I noticed that in the QCAD resource-fonts directory that there are .cxf files. I don't see any information over what type of font file format those files are. I also tried inserting text into a new drawing. The list shows the Arial font I added in the font selection list, but the font name in the dropdown list does not render (see screenshot - the highlighted blue line is the Arial font). I also noticed other TTF fonts in the list that are OS related that validated in Font Book that would not render in the list as well. The text only partially rendered in the rich text entry box.

This is sniffing of a Qt issue on OSX. I opened LibreOffice and had no problem with seeing the Arial font on the list and the text rendered correctly. That tells me the OS font engine is working as it should.

Screen Shot 2020-06-19 at 3.10.57 PM.png (64.56 KiB) Viewed 4691 times

[andrew]

Can you check other applications such as TextEdit or Web Browsers? I haven't heard about that issue before and we didn't have any similar reports from other QCAD users so far.

However, there seem to be quite a number of macOS users with similar issues (and potential solutions):
https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discus ... tion-marks
https://www.google.com/search?q=macos+t ... tion+marks

[52buickman]

Thanks! Polluted/corrupted font cache is the culprit. The jamf.com article did the trick. Good find. One would think Font Book would clean up the font server in its own function.

All is well now. Thanks again.