Another Alternate would be - https://github.com/mozilla/Fira

Thanks for reporting this. How and where can the current problem be seen (testcase URL), and what is the expected behavior?

Aklapper -
The problem arises with the content here - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Traffic_Signs_Manual_%28UK%29 - The PDF uses Frutiger, meaning that when the figures are extracted in Inkscape (or some other SVG editor) a Font substitution is made, this in some cases leads to text being clipped.

The previous versions which demonstrated the problem were deleted (per Commons policy ), so I don't have a test case to hand, but an extracted figure (To SVG) from any of the TSM volume PDF which has text will show the issue.

Currently , I've been updating the figures to use sans-serif(effectively DejaVu Sans) (and then converting the text to paths), which is a temporary work-around.

I was suggesting Arimo (or Fira) might be a closer match in metrics terms, meaning that with a sutiable fontconfig substitution, I can save myself a lot time this side. and get a figure that's a lot closer to the ones in the PDF, without font data"leaking". I don't have Frutiger ( a propriaetry font) installed in order to be able to generate a test example. Sorry :(

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Traffic-signs-manual-chapter-3-diagram_2123_%282008%29_test.svg

First is Arimo, second is generic sans-serif, This didn't clip , but not sure why.

This one is using DejaVu Sans explicitly and the rendering is wrong.

File concerned with last comment - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Traffic-signs-manual-chapter-3-diagram-638.svg

Update: I know WHY it broke.

Inkscape and Firefox allow for the processing of "manual kerning" information.

For whatever reason (possibly licensing, makes evil noises about evil patents) , rsvg isn't doing the kerning in the same way, which means the text doesn't render, and becaause the unclipped version goes over the nominal 'viewbox' it gets clipped.

Would you like me to do some further testing?

In T125410#2006666, @ShakespeareFan00 wrote:

Inkscape and Firefox allow for the processing of "manual kerning" information.
rsvg isn't doing the kerning in the same way, which means the text doesn't render,

How would adding just another font family on the servers solve that problem?

It wouldn't, and I've opened a separate report on that issue specifically.

I've just done a test in Inkscape using Fira Sans, took out the Manual Kerning, and for practical purposes it's an acceptable match for (Frutiger).

Next problem how to convince people to put Fira on the Wikimedia Servers.

In T125410#2009984, @ShakespeareFan00 wrote:

Next problem how to convince people to put Fira on the Wikimedia Servers.

Is Fira available as a Debian package?

It's a part of the texlive-fonts-extra package.

Currently, we only have the texlive-fonts-recommended package installed.

So we have three possibilities:

• decide do install all the fonts provided by texlive-fonts-extra
• defer this bug resolution pending a package only for Fira landed in Debian and Ubuntu
• maintain ourselves an extra fonts package which will first include fira and will include in the future any open source font needed for SVG rendering

@Dereckson : We already have texlive-fonts-extra installed on the image scalers. While it is not explicity mentioned in puppet's mediawiki::packages::fonts, it gets installed via indirect dependencies. But these are TeX fonts anyway, I don't think they're usable here.

fonts-fira has been requested for packaging in Debian, but some license concerns have been raised at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=724629 . I'm not sure how valid these concerns are since there are plenty of font packages in Debian which only ship a TTF file and no font source.

Neither Firo Sans nor Arimo appear to be metrically equivalent to Frutiger from my tests. Firo Sans is narrower and Arimo is wider. Neither of them seem to based on Frutiger or especially similar to it.

Recommend declining, as there doesn't seem to be a "metric-compatiable" alternative to Frutiger.

The root "problem" is that Frutiger is non-free.

If there was a directly 'metric-equivalent' version, then this thread could be closed easily.

The same could be said of any other popular non-free fonts.

Istok is another possibility. It's unlikely you'll ever get a 100% metrics match.

@ShakespeareFan00: Please do not remove subscribers from tasks.