Fontconfig support for LabVIEW under Linux

[anshuljain]

The current Linux flavor of Labview uses the older XFree86 to render fonts. This produces a pretty sorry rendering of the Labview applications compared to the native Linux applications. The newer versions of Labview should be compiled with the more modern fontconfig support for Linux, which is the default across all distributions.

[perim]

This is urgently needed. Font support in LabView for Linux is plain horrible, making it is near impossible to get good looking LabView applications under Linux. LabView is the only program on my Linux box that still uses the arcane XFree86 font system.

[Mr._Jim]

Inspired by Altenbach's recent highlighting of Windows font size inconsistency, I recalled the absolute nonsensical behavior of fonts in LabVIEW for Linux and was about to post something nearly identical to this one.  To further illustrate the wonkiness of fonts under LabVIEW for Linux, I present the following example:

As you can see, Application Font undergoes some very interesting changes as a function of "point" size.  Sometimes a larger point size actually causes font shrinkage, while in other cases the font seems to endure an identity crisis!  (e.g. 16 Point)  Side effects may also include inconsistent boldness.

While this provides endless amusement, it makes porting applications to Linux (and possibly between distributions?) unnecessarily painful because one has to save separate instances of every UI VI with font corrections.

Can someone direct more attention to this problem?

Thanks very much,

Jim

[Craig_S.]

Linux font support is most definitely a sore spot and is in great need of an update to use modern APIs.  Unfortunately I do not think it is being given any serious consideration currently.

I highly encourage any interested users to give kudos to this idea to garner support for allocating resources at NI to address this problem.

Regards,

Craig Smith

[anshuljain]

This issue is known at NI. Unfortunately they seem to be rather too lethargic to do anything about it. From my understanding, the only active team (for Linux) at NI is the one that deals in Hardware (VISA, GPIB etc). They're the ones that typically respond very quickly in the Linux Users Group for any questions/comments/help.

The others ones that handle Labview have never, ever responded to a query in the group...they seem to be detatched from the actual customers (like us). I've made this an issue to decline a license upgrade by my local sales team many times over.

We need fontconfig support!!! Aren't you guys using Labview under Linux and seeing the huge difference between your native fontconfig-enable desktop and the crappy XFree86-rendered Labview environment? 

FWIW, one can get fairly decent rendering by using subpixel rendering+Tahoma fonts under openSUSE. Grab the libfreetype6, cairo and fontconfig packages from my OBS repo at:- http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anshuljain/openSUSE_11.3/i586/, add the repo using the command "zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anshuljain/openSUSE_11.3/home:anshuljain.repo". Then run "zypper dup". Copy tahoma.ttf and tahomabd.ttf fonts from your Windows partition to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/. Run the following command as root:- "SuSEconfig". Log off and log back in. Start Labview and now you'll see Tahoma font in the list...select it and set the size to 13. It should be bearable now. (I need to make this into a guide somewhere as there is a different procedure for Ubuntu/Debian/Mint 🙂 )

[yonatan_tidhar]

I just upgrade my setup (Fedora 14) to LabVIEW 2011 but fonts are still looking bad and I can use very limited fonts from what installed.

Is thare is any fix for of that at labview 2012?