OSX - No fonts available

[mcramer]

Hi there

This will hopefully be a simple question but searching the forums and reading the FAQ (esp. the bit about OSX fonts) hasn't yielded the answer.

I have installed Calibre on my MacBook Pro (10.5.4) and when I want to embed fonts ('cos I hate serif fonts) there are no choices for any of the font drop down lists.

There are plenty of .ttf fonts on the systems so I am at somewhat of a loss. Is there something obvious I could be missing?

Cheers and TIA

[kovidgoyal]

what version of calibre are you using? newer versions automatically install at least one set of ttf fonts in ~/.fonts

[mcramer]

Hi there and thanks for the reply. I should have put that info in the post (I should know better!)

I'm running 0.4.80 - I'll try 0.4.83 just for the hell of it

[mcramer]

Well the latest version made no difference.

Is there something special in installing calibre besides dropping it from the .dmg file to the apps folder?

I also have the "preferences" option greyed out both with and without the reader connected......

[kovidgoyal]

which "preferences" option? what does running

ls -l ~/.fonts

give you?

[mcramer]

the command gives me:

total 2112
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 61276 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationMono_Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 65268 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationMono_BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 65168 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationMono_Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 61144 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationMono_Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 68460 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSans_Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 70960 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSans_BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 70912 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSans_Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 110660 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSans_Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 129416 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSerif_Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 100392 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSerif_BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 100420 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSerif_Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 mcramer staff 156076 3 Jul 09:37 LiberationSerif_Regular.ttf

The preferences I was talking about was in the gui:

Cheers!

[kovidgoyal]

You can access calibre's settings using the hammer icon next to the search field. Those fonts should be showing up in the GUI, not sure why they're not.

[mcramer]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Those fonts should be showing up in the GUI, not sure why they're not.

Me neither but they're not I was going to use the windows version (in fusion) but that errors whist converting the lit file wheres the conversion itself works fine under OSX.

Don't worry about it, I'll figure a work around - the .lit conversion was nice because it keeps the images inline.

Cheers

[rfield]

Hi,
just to add to this thread - I've just tried calibre for the first time today
(Mac OSX 10.5.4 w/ Calibre 0.4.83) - and I'm experiencing the same issue around fonts unfortunately.

If it helps track the issue, the osx console log shows:
Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
every time that calibre launches (oh, and yes - I've checked that the ~/.fonts directory also exists).

Rupert

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by rfield

Hi,
just to add to this thread - I've just tried calibre for the first time today
(Mac OSX 10.5.4 w/ Calibre 0.4.83) - and I'm experiencing the same issue around fonts unfortunately.

Same here.

I show the same fonts as listed above:

total 2112
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 61276 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationMono_Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 65268 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationMono_BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 65168 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationMono_Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 61144 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationMono_Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 68460 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSans_Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 70960 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSans_BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 70912 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSans_Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 110660 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSans_Regular.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 129416 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSerif_Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 100392 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSerif_BoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 100420 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSerif_Italic.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob staff 156076 Sep 1 23:04 LiberationSerif_Regular.ttf

[kovidgoyal]

works for me on tiger and unfortunately I dont have a leopard system to test on, so I'm at a loss.

[Xenophon]

Let me confuse you farther, then. I use Linotype FontExplorer X (it's free as in beer) to manage my skillion fonts. I wish that calibre would give me access to all fonts activated therein, but it does not. That's on Leopard. Behavior was the same on Tiger, however.

I should note that this is likely to be a very common scenario in the Mac world. Anyone who has more fonts than Apple provides will certainly want to have some sort of font manager to deal with activation, sampling, etc. And various articles suggest that Font Explorer X is the most widely-used software for this purpose.

Any chance of installing it on your Tiger system and seeing what'd be needed to support it?

Xenophon

[kovidgoyal]

Not really, if you want to make a font available to calibre, just copy (or symlink) it in the ~/.fonts folder (at least on Tiger). Since typically, once you settle on a favorite set of fonts for your books, you should only need access to them, I don't really see the point.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

works for me on tiger and unfortunately I dont have a leopard system to test on, so I'm at a loss.

If I let you terminal or remote into my mac to try this, would that help?

BOb

[kovidgoyal]

yeah it would. Send your username/password and IP address to kovid at kovidgoyal.net