I know there are other posts on this, but still a little confused even after a forum search.
Upgraded from 8.1.254 to 8.1.38. I understand that Java versioning jumped from v11 to v17. I understand that fonts are bundled with Java (from reading other threads). Is there anything that can be done to change this or is it "what it is"?
Trying to see if I can avoid going through my entire application to review / change all the fonts as Dialog seems to appear significantly different. See attached screenshots.
Right now Noto Sans seems to a better fit for me, but just want to avoid additional font variability down to road if I make the "wrong" choice.
Hi Kevin -
All of these are after the upgrade to 8.1.38. I didn't notice this font difference on 8.1.24 although I did not go through the same "quick brown fox" font comparison then.
The screenshots are from as I see them in the Designer (running on my Windows system) vs. the fonts as displayed on the Vision client on the Linux system.
I'm not sure I totally understand your issue. In the first 2 screenshots Dialog appears relatively similar except for size.
In the 3rd with the side-by-side they're even similar size (or did you scale it up and these are the same screenshots?).
They clearly look like the same font to me, just rendered a little differently because Linux and Windows (and macOS) all render fonts different than each other.
The 3rd screenshot was an attempt to get a size by size view of the fonts (I had to play with the image size to get them to match approximately (screenshots originated on different computers).
The rendering of the Dialog font is definitely different on the Linux system post-upgrade. Pre-upgrade I could expect (more or less) a "wysiwyg" behavior between Designer in Windows vs. the Client in Linux (tested Client on Windows and this is not a problem).
Post-upgrade, it's a bit of an annoyance since the character spacing is different (even if slightly) and causing things to wrap or not fit in the allotted space, so I just need to go back review all the fonts again. I wish I had the screenshots handy to show this but I didn't notice until I upgraded and booted the client for the first time.
As far as differences: if you look at the designer vs vision client fonts you can see how:
Arial takes up more space on client vs Designer - notice the text on the Vision Client extends further.
Calibri and Dialog appear to be the same on Client vs distinct Designer - I recall reading a thread about this somewhere...
Noto Sans seems to be pretty consistent.
Short-term: It makes a big difference on my project since I have limited space and I need to account for translation into French (which impacts font sizing and positioning).
Long-term: I make need to make font adjustments if font behavior changes again.
I can live with this, but just wanted to see if either a) I did something wrong and b) there is some easy fix to get that "wysiwyg" behavior between the Designer and the Vision Client.
Agreed, it sounds like it is an issue with the Linux machine.
I'm not super familiar with Linux, but I tried using fc-match to look at the various font settings:
But this does not explain why Noto Sans looks like it is different from Dialog in the Client screenshot. According to 'fc-match' they both use "DejaVu Sans" so maybe this is the wrong thing to examine (or something else is going on). This also seems to be counter to Noto Sans and Dialog being the same on every system.
I don't think fc-match is relevant here - that's for your system. It outputs "DejaVu Sans" "Book" for any font it doesn't recognize.
"Dialog" is a logical font in Java. It's clearly being mapped to Noto Sans in your screenshots, although perhaps a different variation than the system Noto Sans.
Nothing im aware of. Noto Sans is the font that backs the Dialog logical font in our bundled JVM and that hasn't changed since early in the 8.0 lifecycle. We explicitly bundled these fonts and mapped them to the logical fonts to prevent this type of issue.
Can you clarify? I see a a difference in the font but perhaps I am misunderstanding. If I draw a vertical line from the Noto Sans caption to the Dialog caption the spacing does not match, so Dialog and Noto Sans appear at the very least to have character spacing differences. These are all using the same font size and style (just different fonts in the Designer properties):
Could you try something for me on this client having issues?
In your ~/.ignition/cache/resources/runtimes/17.0.9/conf/fonts dir can you duplicate the fontconfig.Ubuntu.properties file and name it fontconfig.Debian.properties and relaunch the designer? (For reference im wondering if there was an OS match change that happened in java with Font Configuration Files
I'll do this and report back. When you say relaunch the Designer - the Designer is running on my Windows laptop and the Linux system is running the Edge Gateway and Vision Client. Does that make a difference? I can stop the gateway and client, then relaunch.
ahh yes, I missed that bit. Make the change on the linux client and relaunch the Vision Client. You shouldn't need to restart the gateway or the designer on your windows machine for these changes since they are only going to affect the linux client
I noticed that I had other runtime version folders so I found the Unbuntu file from 11.0.16.1 and 11.0.18 and ran a compare against the one in 17.0.9 and they match (checking to see if there were any differences). Also did the same with Linux version and the files match.
I restarted the Client and it does not look like it changed anything. Here is another screenshot. You can see that Noto Sans and Arial appear to be distinct but Calibri, Dialog, and a random whacky font (MV Boli) I chose default to whatever this default / failback font is (Lucidia?).
This was a bit of a wild goose chase on my part (Sorry Chaz!) as in retrospect I do not think this had anything to do with the upgrade to 8.1.38. Something may have happened (inadvertently) to my system fonts. Still not precisely sure how it happened.
I manually installed Calibri, and in the processes re-ran fc-cache. This also fixed the weird discrepancy between Dialog and Noto Sans
This seemed to refresh everything and now things display properly.
