I am working with a document I created in Adobe Illustrator 10 for Mac OS X. I have successfully opened this document in Inkscape 0.48 and working on it on a Mac running Snow Leopard/X11.

Now, I have had to re-format some text which didn't come through properly, even though I have the correct typefaces loaded into my system and Inkscape "sees" these type faces in its "Text and Font" panel.

The face in question is Helvetica Inserat. To my eye, the text I've assigned as Inserat looks right, but in Text and Font panel, if I select that text, I am told that it is "Bitstream Vera Sans."

what up with THAT?

I am noticing this problem with all of the text elements in the illustration, even though they look right to the eye; they are identified as being some variant of a "sans" typeface, rather than what I know them to be.

thank you for any insight.

ink

Some fonts don't work in Inkscape that work in other applications. When you try to use such a font in Inkscape it substitutes its default font, which happens to be bitstream vera.
There is no way to tell what font is going to work in Inkscape. I have several fonts that work - even in Notepad! - and even show up in the Inkscape font menu but just don't work.

InkCat wrote:The face in question is Helvetica Inserat. To my eye, the text I've assigned as Inserat looks right, but in Text and Font panel, if I select that text, I am told that it is "Bitstream Vera Sans."

Does it still say 'Sans' if you position the text cursor (of the text tool) within the text (instead of just using the select tool)?

Background: text objects can carry style information on different levels: within a <text> element there are (multiple) <tspan> elements, normally one for each row, and further nested ones if the font style changes within the same line. Each of the <tspan> elements might have its own font family assigned, whereas often the wrapping <text> object only has the default value 'Sans' (which is overridden by the inner font styles).

**Note: Editing text of imported PDF files can give unexpected results, even if the correct font family is used by Inkscape: see «Text editing tips» from earlier release notes about details, reasons and workarounds.

Well, now it's making a liar out of me, because when I checked after reading your email, ~suv, the Font panel was correctly showing the text in question as "Helvetica Inserat."

However, prior to that, it was either showing the text as Bitstream Vera Sans, or just Sans...made no difference if text tool within the text, or selecting with select tool, but that is a good distinction to make and to investigate.

Ink