System: MacBook Pro, Core Duo, 2 Gb RAM, O/S 10.4.11
Inkscape version: 0.46, Apr 6, 2008

Problem

A newly installed font on MBP does not appear in Inkscape 0.46. The font installed was a TTF file. Font Book said it was a valid TTF font. However it doesn't appear in the list of installed fonts in Inkscape. Grrrr.

Research

Concerning Mac OS X, fonts and Inkscape 0.46 wiki.inkscape.org says: "This issue is fixed in version 0.46." OK. Right. Hmm. However that didn't do me one bit of good.

Further investigation revealed that new fonts are placed in [User] > Library > Fonts. It's the standard location for fonts when double-clicked and added.

However, Inkscape draws its font list from another location: the main font folder.

Solution

Copy any font that Inkscape does not show in its font list that you'll find here:

and paste it to here:

and restart Inkscape (I'm using a MacBook Pro; your system may show something different.)

For the more Unix/Linux minded:

from:

to


The font now appears in Inkscape's list.

Awesome link.
Thanks for sharing details.
I am looking forward for installing this software.

Just want to say thanks! It helped a lot!

wow thanks to you have some hair left...spent sometime trying to figure this one out

on my Macbook I did not find that I was able to copy and paste fonts from the "user" to "computer" lists in the Font Book application.

instead I had to right-click on the "computer" heading and choose "add font". then I had to find the font in Finder and add it manually. it worked after that.

I had the same problem, and fixed it as the other users, almost. My font ended up in Mac's Font Book under User, and not Computer, but I couldn't move it to Computer. So I just deleted it, and made sure that when I reinstalled it I was in the 'Computer' category of Font Book (i.e. the word Computer, and not User, was blue). Hope that helps!

Great, thank you very much!

I love you. Thanks a million.

It is never a good idea to mess with /Library/... or /System/... these folders are for the OS and as such any changes you make here could be lost with a System Update. A better solution is to add your fonts in ~/Library/Fonts (which is what Font Book does) and let X11 know that you have a user fonts directory.

On 10.5 and I suspect 10.4 and 10.6 the way to inform X11 of a user fonts directory is to create a file "~/.fonts.conf". This is a plain text file. I use TextMate to create it but Text Edit works too if you remember to save as "Plain Text"! Now in the file goes the text:



Save and X11 should know about your fonts. It will help some X11 apps if you rebuild the font cache (do this after creating the file above and after adding fonts to you user account), which can be accomplished by Quiting all X11 apps like Inkscape and the X11 environment then running the following command in Terminal:

fc-cache

That's it and no messing with the OS that could be reset with the next OS update.

tkegan wrote:That's it and no messing with the OS that could be reset with the next OS update.

That issue in Inkscape 0.46 has been fixed several months ago in trunk and for Inkscape 0.47 - see bug #215906 “User-installed fonts unavailable in 0.46-3 for OSX 10.4.11?”.

There's no need to tinker with '~/.fonts.conf' and fc-cache when using Inkscape 0.47.