Default font not present on the installed system

[sybersitizen]

Not sure if this a feature request, or just a report of an issue I encountered.

I decided to dig into the Statistics Panel today and configure my own set of statistics. As soon as I started, I saw that no text was showing up in any of the pre-defined charts. Turns out that every one of those is set up to use a font that is not on my system: Segoe UI Variable

I ended up having to change all three font sections within each chart so I could work with them. So, just an observation that maybe there's a different font that would be more 'universal' as the default.

[Mario]

That's very strange.

IMatch retrieves the "default" font from Windows and then uses it for various purposes, e.g. annotations, the ID Plate at the top of the IMatch window, in the Batch Processor, Slide Show and in the Statistics Panel.


Segoe UI was the default font on Windows 10/11 when I recall correctly.
And when I look at my Windows 11 system, Windows returns "Segoe UI" as the default font for menus, caption bars, icons, messages etc. when IMatch calls the corresponding routine. This is why IMatch uses it as the default font. It also derives font sizes from this for menus, captions, messages etc. 

Which Windows version do you use?

When I search in the Windows START menu for fonts, and open Personalization > Fonts, I can search for Segoe. It returns 11 results, including Segoe UI. I can install it from there.

[sybersitizen]

That's very strange.

IMatch retrieves the "default" font from Windows and then uses it for various purposes, e.g. annotations, the ID Plate at the top of the IMatch window, in the Batch Processor, Slide Show and in the Statistics Panel.

These are the Segoe fonts installed in my system:

Segoe MDL2 Assets
Segoe Print
Segoe Script
Segoe UI
Segoe UI Emoji
Segoe UI Historic
Segoe UI Symbol

There's no issue with the ID plate, slide show or face annotations. Ordinary annotations use Arial, so they work. Maybe I changed that myself in the past.

The batch processor defaults to Segoe UI, so it works.

But all statistics default to Segoe UI Variable, which I don't have.

Segoe UI was the default font on Windows 10/11 when I recall correctly.
And when I look at my Windows 11 system, Windows returns "Segoe UI" as the default font for menus, caption bars, icons, messages etc. when IMatch calls the corresponding routine. This is why IMatch uses it as the default font. It also derives font sizes from this for menus, captions, messages etc.

Which Windows version do you use?

Win 10 22H2.

When I search in the Windows START menu for fonts, and open Personalization > Fonts, I can search for Segoe. It returns 11 results, including Segoe UI. I can install it from there.

I have only the 7 results I listed. Maybe I could install the missing one, but there's no need now. 

[Mario]

From what I can tell, the Statistics Panel calls the same methods to get the font to use than all the other features of IMatch I've mentioned above. The font name used is "Segoe UI". Windows 11 defaults to Segoe UI Variable, as per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signature-experiences/typography

I don't have a Windows 10 system running anymore at this time, so I cannot check. But the code that determines the global font base for IMatch has not changed since Windows 7 times, according to my version control system. And the Statistics Panel code is also old (it's part of the 3rd party UI toolkit I use for IMatch).
I've searched the source code of the UI library for hard-coded font names, but they use similar functions to determine the system font IMatch uses. Very strange.

This might very well be something that only happens on your system. Not sure. But I don't recall a similar report ever.

[sybersitizen]

Okey-dokey.

One other detail to know is that the slide show font defaults to 'none' (nothing is listed other than Regular 18), and it does work.

[Mario]

Okey-dokey.

One other detail to know is that the slide show font defaults to 'none' (nothing is listed other than Regular 18), and it does work.

The default font is also system font, unless the user changes the font in the Slide Show settings.
On my system (settings dating back to Windows XP, probably), the slide show font is still set to Tahoma (which was the default Windows font in olden times).

When I rename the settings database and start IMatch, everything goes back to factory defaults I have configured.
And the font for the slide show now defaults to Segoe UI:

You cannot view this attachment.

This is the expected outcome.
Statistics panel working, license plate OK, annotation font OK etc.
I can see no error or problem.

But there is over one billion (!) Windows PCs out there and Windows 10 is now quite old.
There is always a good chance that for one user, something does not work as it should.

Since you have been able to solve this, I'll close this. I've did what I can trying to analyze this (just in case it happens to another user in the future).