Skip to content

Remove fallback code for glyph indices #30168

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
wants to merge 2 commits into
base: text-overhaul
Choose a base branch
from

Conversation

QuLogic
Copy link
Member

@QuLogic QuLogic commented Jun 12, 2025

PR summary

Glyph indices are specific to each font. It does not make sense to fall back based on glyph index to another font.

This could only really be populated by calling FT2Font.set_text, but even that was fragile. If a fallback font was used for a character with the same glyph index as a previous character in the main font, then these lookups could be overwritten to the fallback instead of the main font, with a completely different character!

Fortunately, nothing actually uses or requires a fallback through glyph indices, and this is all internal to the extension.

Note to reviewers: the second commit here is just the last commit from the text-overhaul-images branch, but is not actually relevant here. Please only review the first commit as the second will be dropped before merging. If you prefer, I can target main, but I thought this was relevant to the text-overhaul branch.

PR checklist

QuLogic added 2 commits June 12, 2025 18:46
Glyph indices are specific to each font. It does not make sense to fall
back based on glyph index to another font.

This could only really be populated by calling `FT2Font.set_text`, but
even that was fragile. If a fallback font was used for a character with
the same glyph index as a previous character in the main font, then
these lookups could be overwritten to the fallback instead of the main
font, with a completely different character!

Fortunately, nothing actually uses or requires a fallback through glyph
indices.
@QuLogic QuLogic added this to the v3.11.0 milestone Jun 12, 2025
@github-project-automation github-project-automation bot moved this to Waiting for other PR in Font and text overhaul Jun 12, 2025
@QuLogic QuLogic moved this from Waiting for other PR to Ready for Review in Font and text overhaul Jun 12, 2025
@QuLogic
Copy link
Member Author

QuLogic commented Jun 13, 2025

As an example, in DejaVu Sans, the letter A is glyph index 36:

>>> dejavu = FT2Font('lib/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/ttf/DejaVuSans.ttf')
>>> dejavu.get_char_index(ord('A'))
36

which has metrics like:

>>> g = dejavu.load_glyph(36)
>>> g.bbox
(6, 0, 519, 576)

In the Last Resort font, the Tibetan block is glyph index 36:

>>> lastresort = FT2Font('lib/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/ttf/LastResortHE-Regular.ttf')
>>> lastresort.set_charmap(0)
>>> lastresort.get_char_index(ord('\U00000F00'))
36
>>> g = lastresort.load_glyph(36)
>>> g.bbox
(72, -167, 808, 578)

So if we have a string with both using fallbacks, then the last glyph 'wins':

>>> font = FT2Font('lib/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/ttf/DejaVuSans.ttf', _fallback_list=[lastresort])
>>> font.set_text('A\U00000F00')
array([[  0.,   0.],
       [528.,   0.]])
>>> g = font.load_glyph(36)
>>> g.bbox
(72, -167, 808, 578)

If we had multiple fonts in the fallbacks, and multiple characters in those fonts that used the same glyph index, then lookup would depend on the order of characters in the text!

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
Status: Ready for Review
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

1 participant