DenisChenu wrote: This issue must be reported, and since a solution is adding FreeSans

Why is FreeSans the solution?
Is your GITHUB link to assets showing the current amount of fonts shipped with LimeSurvey?

The Amharic pdf document contained FreeSans and FreeSerif fonts.
The issue is that Amharic is not in all styles included. I would expect that FreeSans has the same issue.

If you look at the amount of characters for certain languages there seems to be always a missing one.
software.sil.org/fonts/

For the long run:
Since monitoring fonts is tough, I would recommend to add a feature to allow uploading / overriding assets (like fonts) per survey. And to define formats like queXML pdf export via format files on surveylevel too.

For the short run:
Define a central font repository in the codebase.
Choose a "gold" standard font set (sans serif and serif) and ask users to check known languages for issues.
Stick to that gold standard font set as default.

Denis is suggesting GNU FreeFont:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_FreeFont

LimeSurvey seemed to also considered Noto Fonts for surveys.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts

Other projects can be found here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicod...pefaces#21st_Century

I am not up to date with html/css.

But before it became "cool" to include fonts into websites (e.g. Google Fonts, etc) it was common to define fonts like somehow like this "Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif".

So at the end you always had a fallback to any sans-serif font that is installed on the computer. Might not look good, but should definitely work.

I also assume that someone who will answer a questionnaire in such an exotic language that requires a special font, has at least one font installed that should work.
But i guess this only works for the web version, not the PDF, right?

holch wrote: But i guess this only works for the web version, not the PDF, right?

The PDF generation is server side and the fonts are embedded into the pdf file. So we need fonts with the correct licence to be bundled with LimeSurvey. Allowing adding fonts serverside via GUI would be nice too.

I'm trying to graps the current situation of fonts inside LimeSurvey. I'm not using all these features and just learn more about the inner workings around pdf export.

Thought so. Thanks for confirming.

jelo wrote:

DenisChenu wrote: This issue must be reported, and since a solution is adding FreeSans

Why is FreeSans the solution?
Is your GITHUB link to assets showing the current amount of fonts shipped with LimeSurvey?

Yes, github link is current one only

We have FreeSans : right, but not FreeSansBold, FreeSansItalic etc …


When i update font system for arabic : i test with dejavusans , i think i test with freesans too ? Dodn't remember.

I don't like to add whole fonts because it's heavy if we don't need it.