Fonts on Mac wrong

This is on Ardor 4.7.13 64-bit, on OS X 10.11.5, running on a Macbook Pro 15" Retina.

I have tried everything I can imagine to get this to work right, but still the fonts in Ardour are wrong. Here is an example of the new project window:

And the main windows:

This makes them very hard to read. Things I have tried:

  • Checked for duplicate fonts
  • Installed and run fontconfig using homebrew
  • installed the nightly build
  • Checked for corrupt fonts with Font Doctor

Any help would be much appreciated.

I have seen this issue with other GTK bundled apps as well. FontForge comes to mind.

All the font issues that get reported on OS X (and there are not many) have so far all been traceable back to the presence of various bits of 3rd party software. Our code works as intended on brand new installations of OS X. We do not know or understand what causes the problems.

Thanks, we’ll look forward to it!

This is due to the font “Helvetica Compressed” which purports to be a Helvetica font, and if installed in your “user” fonts it will override your default Helvetica fonts.

To solve this issue, launch Applications/Font Book, and look in the User section, on the left. Disable or remove the item “Helvetica Compressed”.

I’ve seen this a few times in the past. Apparently there’s a font pack, or other application, which installs this font to the user’s font list.

We probably need to change Ardour to use a specific Helvetica font, rather than the Helvetica “family” on Mac OSX.

-Ben at Harrison

I just discovered that when I launch Ardour under a newly created user account, the fonts are correct.

I am going to get to the bottom of this. When I do, I will post the fix.

Confirmed. I believe this is related to the change in how fonts are classified from the ancient Type 1 Postscript fonts to the modern OTF world. Technically, Helvetica Compressed IS a Helvetica font, but the older Type 1 fonts had no way to distinguish between different weights of font beyond Bold.

By removing all old Type 1 Helvetica fonts from my user fonts folder, the problem is resolved.