Adding fonts to NextCloud + Collabora

[marcusquinn]

Any chance of another look at this please @nebulon — these little things really help with user happiness, and the latest version is well worth the effort for making out go-to online office suite with Nextcloud.

[m-si]

@nebulon I see there is always a lot to do, so maybe it's an idea to mention it again. Do you think we might have a chance to add fonts like that…?

RUN ln -s /app/data/fonts /opt/collaboraoffice/share/fonts/truetype/local

[nebulon]

Thanks for bringing this up again. I have published a new app package which supports adding fonts now. After copying the TTF fonts into the folder, the app has to be restarted as mentioned in https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/collabora/#adding-fonts

[BrutalBirdie]

@nebulon
For some reason all the fonts I added like that show in in Collabora in Nextcloud but are invisible.

Ever encountered something like that?

[nebulon]

@BrutalBirdie what does invisible mean? Where are they invisible? Does fc-match <fontname> correctly recognize the font in the webterminal?

[BrutalBirdie]

@nebulon

root@7cca863b-c650-4447-9dba-c4653dafe333:/app/code# fc-match "Droid Sans"
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

Looks wrong to me...

root@7cca863b-c650-4447-9dba-c4653dafe333:/app/code# ls -lah /app/data/
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 3 root     root 4.0K Aug 21 21:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root     root 4.0K Sep 19 21:01 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 cloudron root 7.0K Oct 10 12:17 coolwsd.xml
drwxr-xr-x 6 root     root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 fonts
root@7cca863b-c650-4447-9dba-c4653dafe333:/app/code# ls -lah /app/data/fonts/
total 24K
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Aug 21 21:00 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 DroidSans
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 DroidSerif
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 NunitoSans
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 OpenSans
root@7cca863b-c650-4447-9dba-c4653dafe333:/app/code# ls -lah /app/data/fonts/DroidSans/
total 96K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K Oct 10 14:00 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  42K Oct  9 13:47 DroidSans-Bold.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  41K Oct  9 13:47 DroidSans.ttf

root@7cca863b-c650-4447-9dba-c4653dafe333:/app/code# fc-match DroidSans 
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

fc-match --all

Does also not include the fonts.
Also having the .ttf files plain in no sub folder in /app/data/fonts yields the same results.

The fonts works tho on the local system.

[nebulon]

I tried this just now and I can confirm that the rendering in the actual document is not working. Seems like some upstream bug then, which needs investigation. Unfortunately there are no errors anywhere.

[m-si]

@BrutalBirdie While playing around to overcome this error. I found an alternative solution. It doesn't fix the collabora CODE font issue mentioned here, but makes it possible to add fonts to a Nextcloud instance hosted via cloudron.

It works with Nextclouds' ability to add fonts as remote_fonts therefore do the following:

1. Add the desired fonts at https://[YOUR.NEXTCLOUD.DOMAIN]/settings/admin/richdocuments
2. Switch to the apps-filemanager of your cloudrons Nextcloud. Create the folder ~/apps/richdocuments/settings
3. Find out in which [APP-DATA-DIRECTORY] Nextcloud saves the richdocuments-data inside the directory ~/data (e.g. appdata_ocv42l2jdx7f)
4. in the newly created folder, create a file fonts.json (so ~/apps/richdocuments/settings/fonts.json exists) with the content

{
    "kind": "fontconfiguration",
    "server": "[YOUR.NEXTCLOUD.DOMAIN]",
    "fonts": [
        {
            "uri": "https://[YOUR.NEXTCLOUD.DOMAIN]/[APP-DATA-DIRECTORY]/richdocuments/fonts/[FONTNAME-1].ttf"
        },
        {
            "uri": "https://[YOUR.NEXTCLOUD.DOMAIN]/[APP-DATA-DIRECTORY]/richdocuments/fonts/[FONTNAME-2].ttf"
        }
    ]
}

5. restart the collabora app
6. restart the Nextcloud app

Additional, remove any font added to the collabora fonts directory...

Edit: After trial and erroring even more, I found nextcloud updating the fontlist only if ~/apps/richdocuments/settings/fonts.json is again saved.

Edit-2: Unfortunatly after a collabora update nextcloud needs to be restarted again to make the font changes again available…

@nebulon maybe this might solve the issue?
cheers