Fonts are not rendered

[furgo16]

While a list of available system fonts is displayed whenever there is a font selector in the GUI, selecting any given font does not seem to have any effect. The font remains always the same.

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a new document and select the Draft workbench
2. Create a text annotation (T, E)
3. With the text selected, go to the View tab in the Combo View panel
4. Change the Font Name property: select any font from the combo box

Expected:

• The text annotation is displayed in the selected font

Actual:

• The text annotation is always displayed in the default font

[furgo16]

Asked for help on the Snapcrafters forum: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/fixing-fonts-on-the-freecad-snap/40026

[soumyaDghosh]

@furgo16 Can you kindly share some logs by running the app from the terminal?

[furgo16]

@soumyaDghosh thanks. Are you looking for something specific? There is not much of an output running from the terminal and following the steps to reproduce:

freecad
FreeCAD 0.22.0, Libs: 0.22.0devR37472 (Git)
© Juergen Riegel, Werner Mayer, Yorik van Havre and others 2001-2024
FreeCAD is free and open-source software licensed under the terms of LGPL2+ license.
FreeCAD wouldn't be possible without FreeCAD community.
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Adding snap-specific PYTHONPATH to sys.path: $HOME/snap/freecad/common/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages:/snap/freecad/1031/lib/python3.10/site-packages:/snap/freecad/1031/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
Qt: Session management error: Could not open network socket
This version of FreeCAD (0.22-37472) is not compatible with Assembly4
You may encounter erors, it is rather suggested to use the stable 0.21 branch
connect failed: No such file or directory

[soumyaDghosh]

Can't find any snap specific logs! @chennes @ppd I think this is something with paths or similar. Please kindly look into this.

[furgo16]

Information on how to add font support to snaps seems inexistent, or at least I'm unable to find it. The closest I found was this comment from a bug report:

Workaround for this issue:
(in apps section)
apps:
some_app:
command: some_app
environment:
XDG_DATA_HOME: $SNAP/usr/share
FONTCONFIG_PATH: $SNAP/etc/fonts/conf.d
FONTCONFIG_FILE: $SNAP/etc/fonts/fonts.conf

Of course this only works in devmode. After switching to strict mode program in snap ends with error that it can't reach /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file. I think should be resolved by adding interface.

These environment variables are not defined in FreeCAD's snapcraft.yaml file. On my system:

• /snap/freecad/etc/fonts/conf.d is empty
• /snap/freecad/etc/fonts/fonts.conf does not exist.
• $HOME/snap/freecad/common/.cache/fontconfig/ has lots of files in it

Digging deeper, it seems that fonts should be handled by the kde-neon extension, as defined in snapcraft.yaml

[furgo16]

Related: https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=72407

[furgo16]

Also related (though I'm not sure if it still applies): https://www.chalk-ridge.com/freecad-snap-package-font-problems-fix/