Font for symbol changed when upgrading to 1.15.0 (latest master)

[yanshay]

I know 1.15.0 isn't out yet, but I have to use it since 1.14.1 panicks and 1.15.0 has the fix.

In my application a sybol I'm using ✓ character. And I get a different version with 1.15.0 than I did with 1.11.0 and 1.13.1 .

This is how it looks like in 1.13.1:

This is how it looks like in 1.15.0:

I'm developing on Mac and haven't selected any specific fonts since things looked good w/o doing anything, but it seems it picks a different font for the symbol now. The rest of the text looks the same.

Is it a bug or am I doing something wrong on my side? (have to search now and pick the right font?)
How can I go back to the original font that was used (which I don't know what it was)?

[tronical]

Hi! I debugged this a bit and I believe in 1.13.1 and earlier we ended up picking Menlo as font - basically the first font that had the character. The glyph picked in 1.14 and later appears to be from the SF Pro font, which is Apple's default system font. In fact, pasting that character (✓) elsewhere in macOS yields the same glyph (from SF Pro) for me, so I believe 1.13 is correct. However, if you'd like to select the font we used in earlier versions, then you can set the font-family property to "Menlo".

[yanshay]

I tried to set Menlo on the specific text and it didn't have any effect. I will try to set it globally.
What was the font that was picked in old (1.11 versions) for other texts? I see width changed a bit there as well and now is overriding frames.
To set a font globally for the entire app, is the way to do it to set it on the main application window?

[tronical]

What was the font that was picked in old (1.11 versions) for other texts?

I think that must've been the same - I don't recall any obvious changes to the font logic until we switched to fontique in 1.14.

To set a font globally for the entire app, is the way to do it to set it on the main application window?

Yes, that's right. Window's default-font-family applies globally.

[yanshay]

Here are some interesting findings:

1. The previous text font for regular text seem to have been Arial, not Menlo
2. Menlo is indeed the font of this check character (and probably other symbols). I can't find which font generates the check - the one from Arial doesn't look like it, it looks different.
3. Setting the font to "Menlo" globally - fix the check symbol but breaks all other text (because normal text wasn't Menlo previously)
4. Setting default font globally to Arial, but putting a simple Text component with "Menlo" font family, with text explicitly inside the Text component - work in the lsp-slint emulator, but doesn't work on the device - and the check stays the same. Bug?
   This is how I do it:

    Text {
        font-family: "Menlo";
        font-size: 60px;
        color: red;
        text: "✓";
    }

5. Even if it did work, it would still cause issues because sometimes text arrive from variables and then Slint compiler doesn't know under which font the chars are used, so wouldn't pick based on where they are shown. So it would require adding dummy texts with potential characters to make it work.
6. Even if 5 worked, I think this makes fixing applications in some cases (such as my case) complex and maybe even impossible. So far I went with Slint default glyph selection (probably also other apps). So it picked the glyphs and used them and there was sort of 'default font' which was a mix of arial (or whatever) for normal text and Menlo and others for symbols. So if I had a text that sometimes included check, and sometimes text, it would display either arial or Menlo depending on content (don't know what would happen in case of a mix, never tried). Now, if I have to set the font myself, I have to set font based on the content, sort of doing that glyph resolution myself (if at all possible in case of mix). This sounds to me like a breaking change for certain applications, at least worth documenting how to fix.

I have only two conflicting characters so I can take care of these issues using images instead of texts, but other applications may have more meaningful issues. Just raising your attention to this. Since you sort of, for years, created a default font implicitly and unknowingly for Slint applications who unknowingly used that font, and now it is no longer available which will cause them to appear different/bad on an upgrade.