Commons:Graphics village pump/November 2015

Safe fonts for Inkscape & Commons

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T64987

I would like to know if there is any known set of fonts (normal, italics, bold) that are REALLY known to work in both Inkscape (in a linux system, debian) and Commons so that Commons will show exactly the same text position and size I see in Inkscape. I checked this list but it does not help. The legend title in this map uses "Liberation Sans:style=Bold" (from Inkscape interface at least, I do not know about the XML itself and I do not care) but what I see in inkscape is not what Commons & Wikipedias show (unless I check the SVG itself but that is not the point). My goal is to find those fonts, stick to them and stop wasting time playing around with font sizes and positions due to the mismatch between Commons & Inkscape's rendering. ANy suggestions? Thank you in advance.--Rowanwindwhistler (talk) 22:36, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

I checked the source of File:TratadoDeLondresTerritoriosParaItalia.svg and it turns out that the problem is that Inkscape wraps the font family with single quotation marks ('Liberation Sans') which is illegal to librsvg. Removing the quotation marks will solve the font issue. You just have to tell Inkscape developers of this compatibility issue or you will have to fix it in Notepad manually every time you upload the SVG file to Wikimedia. (GNOME reacts to librsvg bugs much slower to my knowledge...) -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 05:41, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Aha, thank you for the analysis. Could it be we are facing this bug and the library version that is being used does not have the fix (I do not know how to check what library version Commons and the different Wikipedias are using to compare it against the version containing the fix)?--Rowanwindwhistler (talk) 09:20, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

A good option is always to use "Arial". It will be replaced with "Liberation Sans" by the Wikimedia Renderer (which is compatible with Arial, i.e. characters are the same size) and works on Windows naturally. I'm not completely sure about Linux/MacOS, but I assume both offer font replacement, too. --Patrick87 (talk) 11:00, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

As per en:List of typefaces included with OS X and support.apple.com, Arial is also natively in OS X and iOS so it's safe to use just Arial. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 12:09, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

P.S. (was in a bit of a hurry earlier): Yes, you're probably hitting the linked bug. On Wikimedia servers a custom build of librsvg 2.40.2 is used if I'm not mistaken, so it does not include the fix yet (which is a shame, but somehow nobody at WMF feels responsible to get an updated version running). That's also why I use plain "Arial" nowadays since there's no possibility to achieve a nice font stack with this bug. --Patrick87 (talk) 12:36, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

PPS: @quotation marks: To be clear, this is not an Inkscape bug, so there is nothing to report. With exception of Scour (which is part of Inkscape) which convert single quotation marks completely bad to HTML-Entity (unfortunately no bug-report found, so I made a new here) ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)  13:42, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

I see. So, if I understood correctly we basically have to wait for whoever deploys librsvg to install the new library version that should allow fonts with names including spaces to work properly. And meanwhile we can use those like Arial that have one-word names and are in the list of supported fonts. And then there is this additional bug with the saving extention, used for plain SVGs as far as I know. Did I miss anything?--Rowanwindwhistler (talk) 21:29, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Hm no and yes, it's maybe a bit funny (screwy). You can remove this bug in removing the quotation marks, because this is also allowed in the standard (only not the prefered variant), in fact I don't know any viewer which can't interpret this font-names without (and it would also not made any sense). ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)  13:57, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Fiat CR.20b trainer or not

These look, at first glance, to be a Fiat CR.20b trainer. However, the strut arrangement does not match any images or drawings i have seen , so far. does any body have any ideas?--Petebutt (talk) 11:50, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Stuck rendering on this SVG file?

Hi, this is related to this help request on enwiki. Wikimedia seems to be having trouble rendering any new versions of File:Glasl's Model of Conflict Escalation.svg. The last step should be "Together into the abyss". I think that another user uploaded an SVG with errors (doesn't render in Firefox), which caused Wikimedia to stop trying to render it and any subsequent versions (even the ones uploaded later which do seem to render fine in Firefox). Can anyone take a look? I've asked in IRC, no response yet. Thank you. --BurritoBazooka (talk) 15:00, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Hallo BurritoBazooka, this is an actual cache problem of Wikimedia (not SVG), see phab:T119038. ↔ User: Perhelion (Commons: = crap?)  15:13, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Notification: 2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey

A survey is going on about improving and producing tools for Wikipedia. One topic is to improve SVG rendering. You can support this request by giving your vote on 2015 Community Wishlist Survey. --Menner (talk) 08:22, 30 November 2015 (UTC)