Ignition 8.0.2 Font is different to 7.9.6

Ignition Early Access
1

Hi all,
As shown in the screenshot, v 8.0.2 cant display the same text label in full as in v 7.9.6.

I believe you can replicate the issue by a Text Label
Size: 106x22
Font: Dialog, Bold, 16
Text: Filtered Water

Is there any workaround to resolve this problem for all labels at once? I have hundreds of those labels.

font%20size

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2

I found this as well, also, the capitcal ‘i’ is now a serif fonttype rather than sans-serif (it now has serifs, the little dags at the ends of lines on letters image ), making it now distinguishable from I and l :grin: (i and L)

They’ve also forced anti-aliasing on by default and removed the option altogether which is AWESOME! I imagine lots of people never used this as they didn’t know what it did, but this makes all font edges smooth and not ugly and jagged.

I can see the slight change in size however, as you’ve found, being an annoyance for upgrading… I always allow a buffer in my labels, as I’ve found if they’re too fine, different resolutions (usually lower) will cut trailing text off

3

I'm not aware of any way other than manually going through and updating them. Unless you've used a template for labels, in which case you could update the template to update all instances at once. (I recommend using templates for just about everything.)

Yes.

4

Yes, unfortunately one consequence of shipping our own Java runtimes with Ignition was that we no longer had access to the Arial font you’re used to, since it’s only part of and licensed with the Oracle JVM. I think you’ll notice this on 7.9.10+ as well if you use the launchers with a built-in JRE.

There’s also a significant change in the Look and Feel between 7.x and 8.0.

5

If the Arial font no longer works, will it always appear in the list of choices? How many others i that list don’t work?

6

Hi all,

About fonts, the Oracle JRE used to include the Bigelow and Holmes Lucida font. It was mapped to the Dialog font and even hard coded as a fallback font if the specified font name could not be found on the system (for example, you select Comic Sans but it isn’t installed on the system) or if the Character cannot be represented in the selected font. This is because the Lucida Sans font had pretty good glyph matches for a lot of languages. Unfortunately, the Lucida Sans font is not included in the Open JDK, and not even the standard Oracle JDK due to licensing. This would have broken almost all projects that use any internationalization and the fonts that would appear on buttons might vary from computer to computer so we needed a fix. We settled on Googles Noto Sans. It has high coverage of most languages and can be redistributed and bundled with our bundled JVM. The Dialog font is now mapped to this font meaning that in most scenarios your projects would work seamlessly without modification, even after considering internationalization. There are really only two downfalls here:

  1. CJK Fonts could not be supported. The Font files are just too large to be distributed with the bundled JDK. There are plans to make it easier to add these yourself, but for now you will likely need to install them. The can be found HERE
  2. If you use the default Dialog logical font some of the attributes of glyphs might differ slightly from Lucida’s resulting in some cut off of otherwise tightly packed components whose bounds were set based on the character width. This requires that the component be resized to match the Dialog font or a specific Physical font be chosen for those components (It should be noted that you must ensure that the selected font is installed on all machines that will launch a Designer or Vision Client using this font)

More information about Physical and Logical fonts can be found HERE and information about the removal of the Lucida Font can be found HERE

I hope that provides some clarity about the font changes made in Ignition 8.0!

Thanks,
Jonathan C

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7

Arial will still work btw, but there is a caveat. Arial must be installed on each computer you are launching Designers and Vision Clients on for Arial to be actually used (otherwise a Logical fallback font will be used). It is always recommended to use a Logical font instead of a Physical font for this reason. If you are certain that Arial will be installed there is no reason not to use it though.

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I think I’m the one who injected Arial into this when it turns out I meant Lucida Sans. I was just referring to the old default font before we started bundling runtimes.

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9

Just curious, has anyone written a short series of instructions to replace the new font with something that would take a minimum of space on ( for example ), a Panelview display? It would be great if the example font included a zero as in the number between -1 and +1 that has the Danish slash to distinguish it from the Large Case o ( Oh! - not 0 ). Oh-Oh-Oh that would be a great way to save others some time when going from larger to smaller displays yet using the same graphics areas. The horizontal width can make it difficult to distinguish one command from another when the pixel resolution is limited for a fixed amount of text. Maybe this should be a separate forum question… yet it seems related.

10

God forbid!!
I have actually seen this used on a SCADA system before though. I was absolutely horrified; had nightmares for weeks after! :hot_face:

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