Font issues with Symbols

Ignition Early Access
1

So I’ve upgraded from 7.9 to 8 and now certain text symbols have been replaced with boxes. More specifically I’ve been using the ↶ symbol as the text for a navigate back button. The same happens for the sine wave symbol I’ve used in a few places (∿). Both worked fine before upgrade.

2

Both of those symbols are working fine for me. Can you try deleting <userhome>/.ignition/cache/resources/runtimes/11.0.2? On next client/designer launch, the runtime should redownload from the gateway.

3

I tried the suggestion and saw the runtime download as you described, but the problem still persists. I’ve tried launching designer and client on both the gateway machine and the client machine with the same results. Both machines are running windows 10 if that helps. Prior to this, everything was displayed correctly in 7.9 using the same hardware.

4

Hi @fred.berryman

The reason you are seeing this is Oracle used to bundle the lucida sans font with their JRE. lucida has pretty good coverage for most symbols and I have confirmed that these characters display fine with Lucida. The only issue here is that this font is no longer bundled with any JRE including oracles. We are bridging the gap by including the Google Noto fonts with our platform. They have great coverage for most glyphs but not all of them. It appears you have found this gap. Luckily these fonts are updated regularly and we hope to include the newest versions when we update the included JRE as well as a feature to deliver your own fonts from the gateway on demand. for now, there are a few things you can do to solve this:

  1. Remove your use of these symbols. The advantage here is no additional work is necessary.
  2. Install a font on each client that supports these symbols. Lucida does, however licensing may get tricky depending on the number of client machines you wish to install it on. Other fonts may work, but it will require some research on your part to determine which ones do.
  3. Install a font into the embedded JRE on the gateway. This is tricky, but you only have to drop a font in one place and it will be distributed to clients with the JRE (NOTE: you must delete the cached runtimes on clients to get this update)

If you wish to do step 3 this comment should help you do so.

Thanks,
Jonathan C

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