Selecting font in Geyser

[treimor]

Is it possible to select a font for the various elements in Geyser?

[xabre]

You can do it in labels and gauges, sadly, it won't work for miniconsoles. API refference has the info how to do it for first two.

[SlySven]

The awkward thing with fonts is that sharing them (in packages) is not (yet) implemented and can have licensing issues on some platforms (MacOs / Windows) - I'm hacking away at extending the "letters" that can be used for room markers on the 2D mapper but it won't be complete until I nail down some of this.

(A prototype I've munged together has the possibility to force the use of a specified font and only use "glyphs" {what most people would call "characters"} from that font of this mapper case but it has been pointed out to me that we need a way to include fonts with packages and that was why it is not currently possible to control the fonts used for miniconsoles...)

[Akaya]

You can specify fonts in the stylesheet. Miniconsole's don't use stylesheets so they won't apply to this.

Code: [show] | [select all] lua

mylabel:setStyleSheet([[
  font-family: Arial;
]])

[SlySven]

Humm, and how does Mudlet, or the Qt libraries that it uses, know what "Arial" is unless the font is already known to the O/S or has been loaded into the "font database" {as the (Free) Bitstream Vera Sans/Serif/Mono that we package with Mudlet, are} at start up? For instance one of my PC's a Linux only server does NOT have the Arial font and, as the font is covered by a MS Proprietary license, it would not available to that computer if I was running Mudlet there {or more strictly running my X Display server (the bit of the system that shows the pictures) rather than the Mudlet executable but that's an unnecessary complication that most people don't even have to worry about} .

Nevertheless, if someone is building packages for others to use they ought to take care that the recipients have all the bits - or can get them - that are needed...

[Akaya]

I put Arial as its a default Windows font. Change it as needed.

Addressing your issue, Slysven... Seeing as how font names aren't cross-platform, you'll need a way to grab the fonts from the OS. Vadi was working on this idea when I was attempting the GUI Creator. I can't remember where it was left off.

[Akaya]

I'd imagine, if you could find the OS-specific directory to the font names, you could place them in a lua table for use in Mudlet, though I doubt its that simple.

[Vadi]

My attempt was to use Lua to detect which fonts are available, but implementing it in C++ using QFontInfo would be far easier.

[SlySven]

On *nixs with the required by Qt fontconfig the fonts already on the system are automagically available for the Qt Libraries to use - a C++ QFont without a family name specified there (or by an application previously setting something) will use the system/user specified default but we often override that with a font family name so Mudlet does not blend into the same style as far as fonts are concerned as the user's other applications in some areas but does in others. I recently set my default to a slightly odd one and it was interesting to see which bits of Mudlet changed and which didn't - because I had set an italic default the splash screen looked quite pleasing but some other things that used italics for emphasis (some tool-tips IIRC) on some words lost that emphasis...

More importantly, provided the QFont::setStyleStrategy is NOT set to the enum QFont::StyleStrategy value of QFont::NoFontMerging the user should get something to show for a glyph. N.B. The Qt "QFont class" Documentation for this enum is just not right when it talks about OR-ing a value from the first list with one from the three values in the second list - and the first list is such that you'd possibly want to have more than one of the options from that list anyhow.

It is proving to be an interesting area of study.

P.S. I'm not sure that the local.conf file that gets copied to the root of the mudlet-data directory tree with the Bitstream Vera fonts each time Mudlet started (until a recent development commit that now only copies as needed) has much effect - though those fonts ARE made available to Mudlet by the FontManager.cpp class to supplement whatever the system tells Qt is available.

I'm looking to extend the FontManager class to scan a ./font subdirectory and register on profile loading (and un-register on closure of that profile in a multi-profile Mudlet execution environment) with something similar for packages/modules(?) - I'm just not that clear yet on how package builders can specify/include a font in their products.

[Johndic]

Hi

Have you tried selecting Courier New or another monospaced font in the Options/Notes list window?