Font requirements

[SomeoneElseOSM]

There's a doc

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/d778979732b8d775de77ff4c3b663ed25dc0b981/INSTALL.md

which describes which Ubuntu packages should be needed to install all required fonts.

However, when I ran "generate_tiles.py" (which seems to want all fonts in the stylesheet to be actually installed) recently, it complained about a number of them:

Mukti Narrow Bold
TSCu_Paranar Bold
TSCu_Paranar Italic
TSCu_Paranar Regular
Unifont Medium

Although the stylesheet isn't here, the source I suspect is:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/1fe21083ae1d5b745c1b4120cf098056f248451e/style.mss

and that does still reference those.

Is the duplication (with different case) of "Unifont Medium" deliberate (perhaps for different OS support), and is the mapnik.xml resulting from a "carto" export even supposed to work out of the box with "generate_tiles.py"?

Are the "missing" fonts perhaps differently named or available from elsewhere in Ubuntu 14.04?

(for the avoidance of doubt note that I'm not exporting directly from TileMill; I know that has (other) issues).

[gravitystorm]

We have a problem with these warnings, and I'm not sure what is best. On different platforms the fonts are named differently (e.g. "unifont Medium" vs "Uniform Medium") so we put both names in the list - mapnik will try one and fall back to the other, so the rendering output is the same. However, mapnik outputs a warning for the missing font, which can be seen in some circumstances (e.g. generate_tiles.py) and ignored in others (e.g. tilemill).

So the warnings are unfortunate in that we can't really control them. It would be useful, for example, to warn if neither of the unifont names worked, but it's unnecessary if one of them is missing. I can't see any way to change this without introducing more complexity, for example a script to examine system fonts and rewrite the mss files depending on the platform.

This only covers the unifont case, where I know what the situation is - we need to confirm the Mukti and TSCU_ fonts that you mention.

Also, yes, the compiled output should be useable with generate_tiles.py and any other mapnik system, these stylesheets are intended for such uses.

[pnorman]

We've completely redone the fonts. Warnings are still generated, which is unfortunate, but what happens when fonts change names.