Calibri font does not show up in yEd but is available in Word and Excel on a Mac

Question

My colleague uses a new Mac and I use windows 8.1. When I send her a diagram with node text in the Calibri font where labels have been "fitted to node" the diagram at her end shows several nodes where the text runs over the node boundary. Pdf export of the diagram doesn't show this problem.

When she looks in the properties window it turns out that the Calibri font is not included in the list of options. We know Calibri has been installed on her Mac because it is available in both Word and Excel. Since it is a crowded diagram and much time has been invested on the layout which has to fit on an A4 page it would be very helpful if Calibri would be available on her machine as well. Is there some way this can be achieved?

I noticed that on my Windows machine the range of fonts available in yEd is much smaller than in any of the other programs I use (e.g. Word, Excel, Xara) but at least Calibri is there. Any reason for this? (not that i wish to use most of them in diagrams)

Any hints on how to solve the Calibri font problem would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

yEd relies completely on Java for retrieving font related information. Moreover, font support is inherently operating system dependent and known to be one of Java's weaker points.

Unfortunately, I do not know how the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) determines which of the fonts installed on a machine will be available for use.

However, when running yEd on an Oracle JRE (i.e. the JREs that are bundled with yEd), the following fonts are available on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows:

• Dialog
• DialogInput
• Monospaced
• Serif
• SansSerif
• Lucida Bright
• Lucida Sans
• Lucida Sans Typewriter

So, for maximum cross-platform compatibility, you need to use one of these fonts. However, even if you do use one of the above fonts, there is no guarantee that the glyphs in these fonts are the same size on all platforms. In other words, even with those fonts, text sizes may very from Linux to Mac OS X to Windows.

Answer 2

Thanks for the help Thomas.

 Java's behaviour looks distincly weird to me. I have used other cross platform software and know that there can be small differences in fonst sizes across platforms but at least the fonts were available at both ends.