Missing fonts after following INSTALL.md

[Phyks]

Hi,

I followed https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/INSTALL.md#installation-on-ubuntudebian (on Ubuntu bionic) and was expecting the required fonts to be installed. However, when running Kosmtik, I get the following warnings:

Mapnik LOG> 2019-01-23 14:15:36: warning: unable to find face-name 'Noto Emoji Regular' in FontSet 'fontset-0'
Mapnik LOG> 2019-01-23 14:15:36: warning: unable to find face-name 'unifont Medium' in FontSet 'fontset-0'
Mapnik LOG> 2019-01-23 14:15:36: warning: unable to find face-name 'Noto Emoji Regular' in FontSet 'fontset-0'
Mapnik LOG> 2019-01-23 14:15:36: warning: unable to find face-name 'unifont Medium' in FontSet 'fontset-0'

It seems there are two issues with the fonts:

• First, ttf-unifont package does not seem to provide a Medium font, from looking at the files within the package. Is the unifont Medium font supposed to be provided by this package?

• Second, Noto Emoji is not packaged nor installed, which was already discussed in Where to find "Noto Emoji Regular" #2379. However, there seems to be now a package for Ubuntu (starting from bionic / 18.04 LTS) called fonts-noto-color-emoji which provides the font. Still, the font is named "Noto Color Emoji" and not "Noto Emoji", so simply installing the package is not enough. Same seems to be available in Debian, but only in testing for now. Would it be worth mentionning this in the INSTALL.md (and eventually use the "Color" font)?

Best,

[sommerluk]

Hi @Phyks and thanks for the report.

• Unifont has different names on different Linux distributions (and sometimes even in different versions of the same Linux distribution), see Fix unifont case #429 for details. We have therefore both, Unifont Medium and unifont Medium in our list, so on almost all distributions we catch the font if installed – and you will always get an error message for the other one. We prefer having an error message than requiring our users to customize the font list depending on their Linux distribution. (You say that the Ubuntu “package does not seem to provide a Medium font”. I cannot verify this right now as I do not use Ubuntu, but the production servers at openstreetmap.org use also Ubuntu and did not complain about it. Note that the file name of a font file and the font name of a font file are different things, they are not necessarily identical.)

• “Noto Emoji” and “Noto Color Emoji” are two different fonts. The first is a “normal” font as most other fonts you have on your computer (only one colour, that can be defined by the application). The latter is a colour font, that means it’s rendered with the colours defined in the font file (that makes the nice emojji images). We use intentionally the first, because it does not make sense in our cartographic use case to render coloured emojis. We prefer a standard-one-colour font, where we can define the colour ourself in our rendering style. (Anyway, I suppose Mapnik would not even support coloured fonts.)

Summary: Technically this are non-issues. But I suppose we should make a better description in the INSTALL.md file…

[Adamant36]

A better description would be good. When I first started using Mapnik, I didn't know the warnings about fonts where normal and that it would load without them. So it would be good if there was at least a mention of the fact that the warnings are normal and don't effect anything.

[Phyks]

Hi @sommerluk,

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanations!

I think replicating your comment #3655 (comment) in the INSTALL.md file would be super useful for new comers.