Can Psychtoolbox show installed custom fonts?

[mariokleiner]

@lorisnaspi

Hi Mario,
Thank you for this.
I understood the problem and now I can see the fonts with high quality rendering. It is also amazing how smooth PTB shows them compared to PsychoPy that seems to struggle a lot with text (reason for which I still prefer this toolbox to any others around).

Good that it works.

I did not want to sound polemic in the previous posts. I just think that it is a shame that the contribute has to be handled only by few people that are willing to do so, when the entire community could contribute by reducing each other’s monetary burden.

I agree with you, as did many hundred people “on paper”, and it would be a wonderful thing if it worked and a win-win-win for everybody involved, allowing for sustainable maintenance and further development of PTB, increased collaboration with other projects and all for the lowest possible overall price for everybody. But reality so far says 99% of the userbase do not act that way, even if a large fraction claimed it would do. Since we have a Twitter account since a few weeks, one can get another data point: The sticky Twitter post asking for community contributions has been reshared and liked 37 times, whereas looking at our membership sales, at most 1 lab acted on that in the timeframe, so somewhere between 36 and 37 of those 37 Twitter-Likes where pure slacktivism so far.

And that’s why we can’t have nice things…

But your case in point: Now that all your membership purchases were used up to pay for resolving this issue, essentially your lab would need to buy one more such memberships (every year one) without actually requesting support for the purchase ever. That’s what contributes to general maintenance and development.

Best,
-mario

[Andreas]

I had a similar problem with a self-configured font using FontForge on Windows. Solution:

• open a command window with administrator priviledges
• copy the .ttf file to the C:\windows\fonts folder (copy myfolder\myfont.ttf c:\windows\fonts)
• exit command window
• open Windows Explorer and double click on the font
• choose “Install”
• restart Matlab

Matlab uses fonts only that are physically in the c:\windows\fonts folder. If you open Windows Explorer, select your installed font and get properties of the font with right mouse button click, you will see the folder where the font resides. If it is not the c:\windows\fonts folder Matlab does not use the font. It took me some hours

[mariokleiner]

@Andreas

Matlab uses fonts only that are physically in the c:\windows\fonts folder. If you open Windows Explorer, select your installed font and get properties of the font with right mouse button click, you will see the folder where the font resides. If it is not the c:\windows\fonts folder Matlab does not use the font. It took me some hours

What Matlab does, doesn’t matter for PTB, and the marked solution earlier in this thread does let PTB find fonts not only in the system fonts folder. PTB uses libfontconfig for font enumeration, Matlab itself uses some other mechanism, so such a Matlab limitation would only affect Matlab, but not PTB’s text rendering.

-mario