Check it out: this tiny svg has 9 simple text objects. Adobe, IE, Chrome, Firefox display all correctly. But Inkscape only renders "Text 1" and "Text 4". WTF???


Any ideas what's happening? It's driving me nuts!

Even more puzzling, the XML was originally created in Inkscape! (v0.48.1 Windows XP). I just extracted a small snippit here, but I have multiple drawings with similar issues that need further editing in Inkscape; too many objects to do manually, so I'm looking ideally for bugfix or XML fix. Unfortunately I no longer have access to the laptop I made them on which obviously displayed them just fine. I've tried multiple PCs, Win XP, Win 7, different versions including v0.48.1 and v0.48.4, to no avail.

I've also played around in Inkscape selecting the invisible tspan objects ("find ID", "include hidden") and noticed in some cases they get parsed into Inkscape with corrupted y-coords (large -ve numbers) which can't be reset. "Unhide all" doesn't work. I can't see any obvious problems with the XML but I'm no expert (maybe you see?).

It renders here.
Well not exactly, I don't have arial narrow font installed, so maybe sans is displayed instead.

You have 3 text objects, not 9, so it gets more weird how parts inside a text object is displayed, while others are missing.
Did you try to change the display mode to outline only?

My system shows the issue.

I haven't got it sussed as yet... some manipulation of the style attributes helps, but nothing definitive.

A little more digging...

Inkscape seems to freak-out badly when Arial Narrow is set to bold. Other fonts seem ok.

Using a text editor (textpad, etc.) to replace "Arial Narrow" with "Arial" in existing SVG files resolves the issue here.

(There are some other anomalies in the test file, but they seem inconsequential.)

Likely related:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5652094

Well yes, 3 text objects 9 lines of text

Thanks everyone for taking a look and identifying the problem, especially Tyler for the ultimate fix. It works for me!!!

I guess multi-line objects with Arial Narrow Bold are suspect... I now have some leads to get my drawings working again. It also explains why it only rendered properly on one particular machine. Hopefully Arial Narrow can be fixed because switching fonts may take some tweaking to get everything looking right. In case it comes to that, can anyone suggest a close substitution for Arial Narrow?

This has been reported before- see Bug #734893 (closed without a fix)- https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/734893

For now I am using "Liberation Sans Narrow" as a substitute for "Arial Narrow". Seems to work OK.

I can say that this does NOT seem to be the same thing as the Adobe bug, since my Arial Narrow fonts are version 2.30 and don't have mangled name fields AFAIK.

After a bit of searching, I turned up reports of problems calculating font height with Arial Narrow Bold in other software, but they implemented bug fixes. This would explain page positions of tspan elements get messed up in multi-line bold text with at least one carriage return. Still looking for more details.

Thanks for the update and the tip on Liberation fonts.

BTW, If you aren't familiar with text editors like textpad, they can find-and-replace across documents to bulk update your svg files that have the Arial Narrow.

Cheers,
TD

Great tip Tyler, thanks! But it turns out I now have a fully working Arial Narrow Bold, so no more search & replace needed !! Woo-hoo!

For anyone else encountering the same issue, Arial Narrow Bold version 2.37 is the secret! Version 2.35, 2.30 (and probably the earlier versions) of the font have the bug and won't work properly in Inkscape.

To find out your font version and other details you can use the font properties extension :
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tru ... rty21.mspx

*HOWEVER*, 2.37 has the mangled fields, so I fixed those with Type Light as described in the Adobe forum link provided by Tyler.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4755431

Now, finally, everything appears to be normal.

It's pretty funny that it's SUCH A SPECIFIC PROBLEM (at least in the case of the Inkscape bug). It's only Arial Narrow Bold, only multi-line text, and only Inkscape (maybe a few other programs, not sure). The other Arial Narrow fonts, even "Arial Narrow Bold Italic", work fine. Single line text is fine. Arial Narrow Bold itself works fine in other software, e.g. Wordpad.

What's maybe not so surprising is finding multiple mind-numbingly stupid bugs with a single Microsoft product, even one as simple as a font...

Anyway, thanks again Tyler and the other posters for helping to crack the mystery!

Hey, great to hear the mod corrects the problem. I downloaded TypeLight before the holidays, but didn't delve into it as yet... I will give it a go (or try v2.37).

And let's not give fonts short-shrift (pun intended)... they are complex little devils, and it's kinda remarkable they work so well, so often.

v2.37 corrects one problem but causes another. You need Type Light for v2.37.