regfont problem with gVim

[chrisbra]

(quoting from an email, I sent last year)

I have been using regfont to install fonts locally, when I am not allowed to install fonts. Unfortunately, I have run into a problem, that I hope you can explain to me.

I use vim and since some versions, it allows to use directx rendering instead of the normal GDI rendering engine. Now all fonts that I have installed using regfont, won't be rendered at all, if I turn on directx rendering for Vim. I have used MS Visual Studios debugger, to trace the problem, but I can only see, that whenever a CreateFontIndirect() call is made, a handle is returned, that looks like this 0xc011751 {unused=???}

Since CreateFontIndirect() is a Windows function call, I am not sure, what this means and how I can prevent this. Do you have an idea, what might be causing this or how this could be fixed?

I hope you can explain the problem or even fix it ;)

Thanks for providing regfont.

[dcpurton]

Hi Chris,

Glad you found the new GitHub repository.

I don't actually have a windows machine any more so I can't test. I am going to put more verbose debugging output into Regfont, but I don't think this will help. AddFontResource does not return any extended error info even when it does fail.

Does Vim fall back to a different font? Or is nothing rendered at all? Or something else? Can you test it on different versions of Windows or with different versions of DirectX? What version of Windows does it fail on?

CreateFontIndirect is a GDI function, so I don't think this is the problem. DirectX uses another function to create it's fonts (I've never done any DirectX programming).

David

[dcpurton]

I think the problem is in the way vim creates the DWrite font. It uses CreateFontFromLOGFONT, but this system call does not work with fonts added with AddFontResource. (At least I couldn't make it do so in a test application and I stumbled across a few forum threads outlining similar problems.)

If this is right, then I can't fix it from within regfont. You could ask the vim developers if they have any thoughts, but I suspect it might mean them adding the ability to use non-installed fonts within vim.

[chrisbra]

Am 2016-01-05 15:03, schrieb David Purton:

I think the problem is in the way vim creates the DWrite font. It uses CreateFontFromLOGFONT, but this system call does not work with fonts added with AddFontResource. (At least I couldn't make it do so in a test application and I stumbled across a few forum threads outlining similar problems.)

If this is right, then I can't fix it from within regfont. You could ask the vim developers if they have any thoughts, but I suspect it might mean them adding the ability to use non-installed fonts within vim.

Oh that is great. I'll update the vim-dev ml list then. Does the CreateFontFromLOGFONT indicate an error somehow?

[dcpurton]

Yes. CreateFontFromLOGFONT returns 0x88985002 (DWRITE_E_NOFONT; Indicates the specified font does not exist.)

My test application was taken from a Windows 7 SDK sample (https://github.com/theonlylawislove/WindowsSDK7-Samples/tree/master/multimedia/DirectWrite/GdiInterop)

I modified it just enough to get it to build using w64-mingw32 and ran it under wine. I added a call to AddFontResource at the start of wWinMain.