Page 1 of 1

font problems on OS X

Posted: Fri May 09, 2003 9:26 am
by Dan
Hi,

Thanks for the new version of Oxygen.

In both 2.0 and 2.0.1 Font characters overlap each other, particularly but not only when I select text. I've tried Helvetica and Serif fonts of various sizes. The WIDTH of the overlap is never more than one character

I've been using oxygen 1.x because of this problem. (Also, there were major performance problems with 2.0, but I see you have addressed that in 2.0.1. Thank you.)

I've enclosed a PDF file which illustrates this.

Thanks,

Luc

-------------------


Hi,

After some more tests, I found that certain fonts are OK (so far). E.g., Geneva 12 and 14 didn't have this problem.
Helvetica 12 is OK. So the problems may be restricted to font sizes larger than 12.

That might make 2.0.1 usable, thus making this problem less urgent.

Also, when I select text (even for smaller font sizes), the text moves a bit and some characters go away (and return after deselect).

When I switched to Geneva font, the system logged me out. I've had that happen before (can't remember if it was while using Oxygen).

---------

Hello Luc,

The font problem occured when Apple changed the Java version from 1.3 to 1.4.

There are workarounds for this:

1. Use a fixed width font, like Monaco, or Courier.
2. Use Geneva with larger sizes, like you already did. Other fonts may work fine when using sizes like 16, 18.
3. Change the info.plist from the application bundle and specify the Java version 1.3, instead of 1.3+. But I do not recommend comming back to Java 1.3...

We tried to fix the problem, but with no success. We also reported this to Apple.

I will put our discussion on the Oxygen forum, it may be useful to other users.

Best regards,

Dan

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2003 2:04 pm
by Ian Tindale
Ah, I see that it's not just me that had the problem.

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:40 pm
by george
Ian,

AFAIK there are no font problems when using Java 1.3.1, therefore you might consider configuring oXygen to use Java 1.3.1 instead of Java 1.4 (the default behaviour). To do this you should edit the Info.plist file and look for the following entries:

Code: Select all


<key>JVMVersion</key>
<string>1.3+</string>
and change it to

Code: Select all


<key>JVMVersion</key>
<string>1.3.1</string>
The Info.plist file is located inside the oxygen application in Contents/Resources/Java. To browse into the application contents you should select the "Show package contents" (or something similar) from the application contextual menu.

Let us know how is going.

Best Regards,
George

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 5:12 pm
by sorin_ristache
Hello,

Update 9 of Apple's Java 1.4.2 virtual machine, that is 1.4.2_09 fixed the text selection painting and character overlap problems. I just tried it on a Mac OS X 10.4.2. Also it is fixed in the 1.5.0 family of Apple JVMs starting with 1.5.0_02.

Regards,
Sorin

Re: font problems on OS X

Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 7:07 pm
by JasonGawker
Hi

unfortunately, i had the exact same problem with the xml editor. tired a few different things, but the font overlapping problem remained, eventually i tweaked oxygen and solved it. my tip is reading this little book, which is a great tutorial for XML. it doesn't answer ALL problems, but definitely can deal with 99% of them, even if its a matter of editor.

jason

Re: font problems on OS X

Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 11:59 am
by sorin_ristache
Hello,

Do you mean that there are still overlapping problems with some fonts in version 1.5.0_02 or later of Apple's JVM? Please specify the JVM version with which you run oXygen (the About dialog opened from menu Help -> About, the System properties tab, the java.vm.version property) and the font family and font size set for the editor panel from Options -> Preferences -> Fonts -- Editor. What is your oXygen version?


Regards,
Sorin

Re: font problems on OS X

Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 11:54 pm
by krbeesley
Newbie question. Font/display problem in OS X. 6 Nov 2009.

I have not used oXygen for a long time, though I have kept up the license. I have
1. a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5.8
2. Java 1.5.0_20

and today I downloaded oxygen v. 11, launched it, registered, and found that most of the text on the screen is scrambled. Lots of empty boxes and strange characters, even in the text of the Tip of the Day.

On the command line where I launch oxygen (launching oxygenMac.sh), I see the following message:

[orayvi:~/ht/oxygen_] beesley% Fri Nov 6 14:21:27 orayvi-3 java[564] <Error>: GCGetGlyphIdealMetrics failed: error 1.

So it looks like a font problem of some sort.

Any suggestions? Do I need to provide more information?

Thanks,

Ken

Re: font problems on OS X

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 5:25 pm
by sorin_ristache
Hello,

It seems the OS X font that is installed on your Mac computer and is used for the Oxygen editor panel is corrupt. Does restarting Oxygen fix the garbled characters? If not please quit the Oxygen application, edit the Info.plist file of the Oxygen icon bundle and add the parameter

Code: Select all

    <key>apple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz</key>
<string>false</string>
in the key

Code: Select all

    <key>Properties</key>
and restart Oxygen by double click on the Oxygen icon. That will try to use the Java cached glyphs and not delegate to CoreGraphics as frequently as Quartz.

Other workaround is changing the editor font from menu Options -> Preferences -> Fonts -- Editor for avoiding the corrupt OS X font.


Regards,
Sorin

Re: font problems on OS X

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 8:01 pm
by krbeesley
Sorin,

Thanks for the message.

1. Restarting oXygen does not solve the problem (corrupted font in the oXygen GUI).
2. Editing Info.plist as you indicated does not solve the problem. In fact, if I edit this file as indicated, oxygen no longer launches---it briefly flashes a dialog message that says "Opening files and running <oXygen/> XML Editor", and then disappears.
3. If I restore the original Info.plist, I note that there are in fact two error messages that get printed out to the Terminal during the launch:

beesley% Mon Nov 9 09:43:10 orayvi-3 java[178] <Error>: GCGetGlyphIdealMetrics failed: error 1.
Mon Nov 9 09:43:13 orayvi-3 java[178] <Error>: GCGetGlyphDeviceMetrics failed: error 1.
(this second message repeated 22 times)

and then, as before, the oXygen GUI comes up with unreadable dialogs and menus.

4. If I try to access Options -> Preferences -> Fonts all the displayed options are corrupted, so I can't see what I might be choosing.

5. I find it a little hard to believe that some default OS X font being used might be corrupted. I suppose it's possible, but I have no trouble with my fonts in other applications. My system is generally set up to use UTF-8. The environment variable LANG is set to en_US.UTF-8. I don't know if that's significant.

Ken

Re: font problems on OS X

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 1:30 pm
by sorin_ristache
krbeesley wrote:2. Editing Info.plist as you indicated does not solve the problem. In fact, if I edit this file as indicated, oxygen no longer launches---it briefly flashes a dialog message that says "Opening files and running <oXygen/> XML Editor", and then disappears.
The message "Opening files and running <oXygen/> XML Editor" is displayed only by a second instance of Oxygen that detects a first instance that is running and delegates to the first instance any files specified for opening in the second instance. You have to quit the first instance of Oxygen by Cmd-click on the Oxygen dock bar -> Quit and restart it in order to apply the change of Info.plist.
krbeesley wrote:4. If I try to access Options -> Preferences -> Fonts all the displayed options are corrupted, so I can't see what I might be choosing.
You can see the names of the font options in the User Manual. Please let us know if changing the fonts in the Oxygen preferences (editor font, GUI font, Text component font) fixes the problem.
krbeesley wrote:5. I find it a little hard to believe that some default OS X font being used might be corrupted. I suppose it's possible, but I have no trouble with my fonts in other applications. My system is generally set up to use UTF-8. The environment variable LANG is set to en_US.UTF-8. I don't know if that's significant.
If you did not install some custom fonts yourself in a subfolder of the Apple Java virtual machine then the Apple Java virtual machine that runs Oxygen maps logical Java fonts to the native OS X fonts for rendering the Oxygen UI. So either a font is corrupt in OS X or the Java virtual machine has a problem with the metrics of some font.


Regards,
Sorin

Re: font problems on OS X

Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:30 am
by krbeesley
Hello Sorin,

Many thanks for the help. I finally got into the Font-selection page and found the Reset-defaults button. That solved the problem.

Ken