Google Docs problem

fatetrader
fatetrader Posts: 7
in Font Technology
As you can see on the attached picture, Roboto font is showing different bold variants while Gudea is not, both fonts are installed locally and in other programs they work but not in Docs why is that happening?

Comments

  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,888
    I believe Google Fonts uses its own sources for fonts, not your locally installed ones. So what you have locally probably has no effect on what GDocs shows in its UI.
  • fatetrader
    fatetrader Posts: 7
    I thought so, I'm guessing there is no fix for this at the moment that you know of.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,888
    edited December 2017
    Ask Google to make more styles of the typeface available?

    Also, note that Google only shows a fly-out menu if the styles available for the family go beyond the common four-member family (regular, italic, bold, bold italic). So even if the family has bold, italic and bold italic, they are not shown. These styles are accessible by applying bold and italic styling to the base font.

    Of course, you get no indicator or clue as to whether these extra styles actually exist or not. For example, there is no "bolder" version of Arial Black. But then again, plenty of apps share this problem, it's not unique to Google Docs.
  • fatetrader
    fatetrader Posts: 7
    edited December 2017
    I'm going to expand my question a little bit here, to paint you a whole picture of what I'm trying to achieve.

    So I have downloaded Gudea's 3 original font files and with fontforge I have added several missing glyphs to all there files (regular, bold and italic), these are just some specific letters to my native language and are not included in english version of Gudea.

    Before you ask. Yes I have contacted the woman who created this font about the changes I made and she was completely fine with it and I even asked her to upload them to Google, which she did but it seems not to have worked, maybe Google didn't do it, who knows, in any case I didn't want to bother her about it any more.

    Anyway, back to the subject, the thing is that Regular font is being displayed correctly in Google Docs with my national characters present but bold and italic versions aren't. So how is that possible that only a regular version of this font is being recognized used from my local drive while the other ones aren't?

    After adding these extra glyphs I changed the meta with proper naming and generated the fonts, maybe I should have done something more I don't know of?
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,888
    It doesn't matter what you do with your copies of the fonts or how you name them. Your browser is only loading the Google Fonts version that the Google Docs app is using.

    Since the font was open source, you didn't have to contact the designer, and I wouldn't have asked about permission. However, it is just as well that you did, in order to get your additions potentially into the version of the font hosted by Google. (Not that this was the only way!) This may take time, and I'm not super up on the usual time lags involved. Maybe @Dave Crossland will chime in, as that's his work.  :)
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    Please post a link to your work on https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1179 and I'll update the family with your work next year :)
  • fatetrader
    fatetrader Posts: 7
    edited December 2017
    Thanks @Dave Crossland here's the link to the Github issue with the link to Gudea, it inculeds 3 files (regular, bold and italic)


  • fatetrader
    fatetrader Posts: 7
    Hi @Dave Crossland did you have time to look at it?
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    Will be next year. Happy holidays :)
  • fatetrader
    fatetrader Posts: 7
    Dave Crossland said:
    Will be next year. Happy holidays :)
    OK, can't wait :smiley: Merry Christmas and a Happy NY!
  • fatetrader
    fatetrader Posts: 7
    edited February 2018
    @Dave Crossland Hi Dave, any chance you could take a look at my Gudea font? it's been sitting on Github case:1389 for quite a while now. Thanks

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