How to prevent "default font" error when loading on Mac

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

When opening my project (which I developed on Windows) on my Mac, I receive three consecutive warnings about the “Default Font”:

Error Loading Default Font
Substituted missing font with Helvetica.

Error Loading Default Bitmap Font
Substituted missing font with Helvetica.

Error Loading Default Font
Substituted missing font with Helvetica.

This substitution is fine, but since I’m going to be distributing this file, I’m hoping to not have users’ first experience opening the file be an error.

I thought about trying to find every Text top in my file and point them at a font I distribute with the Toe, but this would involve editing widgets, etc.

Is there any way to suppress or prevent these errors?

2

How are the warning presenting themselves? It is a popup or just a warning on the node. We do include some fonts that ship with TouchDesigner as well, OpenSans, NotoSans and Roboto. Those would be safe picks as well.

3

They present as popups - standard Mac yellow triangle sign with exclamation points. Is there a quickish way to change all fonts to one of these shipped fonts? It’s not clear from the warnings what text tops are the offenders.

4

ya it’s a quick script:

r = op('/project1')
ns = r.findChildren(type=textTOP)
for n in ns:
	n.par.font = 'Open Sans'
1 Like
5

Fantastic, I didn’t know about that type flag, really helpful. Thanks malcolm!

6

Huh, the plot thickens a little: I’ve changed all fonts to Open Sans for all my project’s text TOPs, but am now still getting font errors about text TOPs in /ui/dialogs

Is there any way to change the fonts in /ui for a project I’m distributing to other people? Isn’t that not local to the .toe?

7

/ui is not local to your .toe, it’s reloaded from our installation folder. What error are you getting there? They should be using fonts that are available on all systems.

8

Also, under Edit->Preferences, you can turn off the popup warning/error dialog by changing the ‘Show Startup Errors’ option at the bottom. I’m curious why this is on for those other machines though, since it should be off by default.

9

The Mac displaying the errors does have “Show Startup Errors” set to None. But, I still get modal popup with Yellow exclamation point dialogs with the “Error Loading Default Font” messages.

This is on Touch 2021.11180 and macOS 10.14.6.

If I look in the Errors dialog after the project opens, I see many warnings of 'Substituted missing from with Helvetica" in sources like:

/ui/dialogs/dialog_error/total_errors/bg (text TOP)
/ui/dialogs/mainmenu/fps1/bg (text TOP)
/ui/dialogs/timeline/transport/timecode/bg (text TOP)
/ui/dialogs/dialog_error/total_errors/bg (text TOP)

The font parameter in all these TOPs appears to be green, with a value of “parentoverride:Verdana”

10

Ok thanks, I see where the dialog box is coming from, I’ll make that not appear anymore. It’s for more internal fonts.
However all mac’s should have Verdana installed as part of the default OS. Do the machines perhaps have some configuration where it’s been removed? Do you see it missing on the OSs font list?

1 Like
11

Thanks a lot!

Yeah, I think that’s what’s going on. When I go to Font Book, Verdana is listed, but in a light grey, and “Off” is listed to the right of it. Strange. I’m on a company issued laptop, so not sure how it got that way, maybe it’s a configuration thing. Just happy to realize most users probably won’t run into this. Thanks for the dialog fix. Onward!