Fonts in ~/.local/share/fonts are not taken into account

[pieqq]

Tested on Ubuntu 18.04 with gimp 2.10 (rev 38) installed from stable channel.

Steps to reproduce

1. Download a font from the Internet, double click on it (it should open with Gnome Fonts)
2. Press Install
3. Open Gimp 2.10 (snap version), create a text layer and try to find the newly installed font

Actual results

In step 2, the font is installed in ~/.local/share/fonts. In step 3, this font is not available on Gimp 2.10 (but it is available on Gimp 2.8 installed through apt).

If I manually copy the font from ~/.local/share/fonts to ~/.fonts/ and restart Gimp 2.10, the font is available.

[lucyllewy]

Does removing the gimp snap and reinstalling, after you've added to font to ~/.local/share/fonts, fix it?

[pieqq]

Yes. After I reinstall GIMP (sudo snap install gimp), the font in ~/.local/share/fonts is available.

[lucyllewy]

This is a problem with the desktop-helpers and not specific to gimp. The desktop-helpers only recompile the font cache after a refresh of the snap happens. They do it this way to prevent slow launch times beyond the first after the refresh. Rebuilding the fonts every launch would incur a performance penalty.

[pieqq]

Thanks for the feedback.

But...

If I manually copy the font from ~/.local/share/fonts to ~/.fonts/ and restart Gimp 2.10, the font is available.

Why does it work with one directory and not the other?

Should I file a bug in the desktop-helpers project?

[anthony-coble]

@pieqq did you submit this issue to another repo somewhere? I am experiencing this and would like to follow the resolution.

[hadware]

Experiencing this as well (Gimp 2.10 on ubuntu 18.04)

[astrojuanlu]

I tested sudo snap remove gimp && sudo snap install gimp and it worked.

[freechelmi]

Juste a note :

Copying the font to the system-wide dir

/usr/local/share/fonts

makes it available in snap Gimp directly.

We should have a way in gnome font viewer to install it system-wide

[ChemoCosmo]

Same problem here with GImp 4.10.20 on Ubuntu 18.04.
Only that no solution works: Neither putting the font in ~/.local/share/fonts or ~/fonts nor reinstalling Gimp (via snap) afterwards gives acces to the font (Impact) in Gimp.
Other programs like writer can find and can use the font.

[mapto]

Had same situation as @ChemoCosmo (on Ubuntu 20.04 and Gimp 2.10.20). Funny thing is that reinstalling Gimp via snap also solved the same problem on Inkscape.

[jabowery]

# sudo snap remove gimp && sudo snap install gimp
gimp removed
gimp 2.10.28 from Snapcrafters installed

fixed it for me, but I have to wonder why it is I'm getting version 2 while ChemCosmo reports version 4. Did gimp do a version reset and start numbering over or do I have a fault snap installation?

Also, if some folks are doing a snap reinstall but failing to fix the problem the issue seems to remain open.

Finally, a comment on dependencies:

If desktop-helpers takes it upon itself to defer recompilation of fonts until a snap reinstall, then desktop-helpers needs to be integrated into the version updating system so as to notify the user that they need to update gimp and it should notify the moment a new font is installed.