How to load custom font?

[9mm]

I'm trying to figure out how to load a font from a path, as this will be running on ubuntu and i dont want to mess with trying to install fonts when I deploy. Id rather use a few fonts in the git repo

  FONTS = [
    { name: "Akira Expanded Not-Rotated 12", filename: "akira.otf", spacing: -25 },
    { name: "Vogue Regular", filename: "vogue.ttf", spacing: -25 },
  ]
  
    font = FONTS.sample
    text = Vips::Image.text "test text",
      fontfile: Rails.root.join("lib/assets/fonts/#{font[:filename]}").to_path,
      font: font[:name],
      width: render_width,
      height: render_height,
      spacing: font[:spacing]

This always renders Arial no matter what. I can tell its loading the proper file as when i put a bogus filename it expectedly errors... yet there is no error about "font not found from loaded files" so it makes it difficult to debug if i have the name correct, and something else is wrong... or if the name is just wrong.

Ive tried...

Vogue, Regular
Voge
Vogue Regular

etc

Do I need some extra library installed?

[jcupitt]

Hello @9mm,

It should work (I think?). You can use fc-scan to get the name from a font file, for example:

$ fc-scan MissFajardose-Regular.ttf 
Pattern has 28 elts (size 32)
	family: "Miss Fajardose"(s)
	familylang: "en"(s)
	style: "Regular"(s)
	stylelang: "en"(s)
	fullname: "Miss Fajardose Regular"(s)
...

So I can use:

$ vips text x.png "Hello World" --fontfile MissFajardose-Regular.ttf --font "Miss Fajardose" --dpi 600

There's also FC_DEBUG to debug font loading issues.

[jcupitt]

Just set the env var before running the command, for example:

$ FC_DEBUG=1 vips text x.png "Hello World" --fontfile MissFajardose-Regular.ttf --font "Miss Fajardose" --dpi 600

It's incredibly chatty and it'll take a while to read the output, but it should have the info you need.

See:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html#DEBUG

[9mm]

hmmm.. it just exits immediately with no error or output

FC_DEBUG=1 vips text x.png "Hello World" --fontfile baberry.otf --font "Baberry" --dpi 600
FC_DEBUG=1

Is there some kind of other package i need to install? all i did was brew install vips on OSX

[jcupitt]

Ah you said you were on ubuntu. I don't know if macOS can use fontconfig in the same way, I'll check.

[jcupitt]

Yes, I think cairo on mac is using the native macOS font renderer, so you can't load fonts dynamically, you have to install them. It should work on ubuntu though.

[9mm]

Ughh I'm very sorry about that. I meant to type "ubuntu in production and OSX locally" but got sidetracked halfway through my sentence.

Ok thank you, i'll just install them but try on ubuntu. I really appreciate it