Fonts

Introduction

The HMP devices come with a reasonable set of built-in fonts, including fonts for non-Western topography, that should cover the common usage within digital signage projects. These fonts are also present within Elementi / HMD software.

If a particular font is required, for instance to follow a corporate identity, additional custom fonts can also be added (within some reasonable limits) inside a project / Fusion Style Pack and used on the HMP.

New in firmware 4.1 / Elementi 2016: The complete collection of Google Noto fonts is included within the built-in fonts in order to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel. The Chinese font AR PL New Sung and the Japanese IPA fonts have been removed in favor of Noto Sans.

Built-in fonts

The following TrueType and OpenType fonts are included within the HMP devices and Elementi / HMD software:

Family	Fonts	Notes
Noto Fonts for all languages.	Noto Sans Noto Sans CJK - with variants JP, KR, SC, and TC Noto Serif Noto Mono Noto Kufi Arabic, Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto Nastaliq Urdu Noto Emoji	Added in firmware 4.1.0. Noto Sans is now the default font for text areas in Elementi 2016.
MS TrueType core fonts for the Web for multiple languages including Western, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek and Hebrew:	Andale Mono: regular Arial: regular, bold, italic and bold italic Arial Black: regular Comic Sans MS: regular and bold Courier New: regular, bold, italic and bold italic Georgia: regular, bold, italic and bold italic Impact: regular Times New Roman: regular, bold, italic and bold italic Trebuchet MS: regular, bold, italic and bold italic Verdana: regular, bold, italic and bold italic Webdings: regular
FireFly Sung for Chinese (based on fonts originally distributed by Arphic):	AR PL New Sung: regular	Replaced by Noto fonts starting with firmware 4.1.0 / Elementi 2016.
Gargi or Devanagari script:	Gargi: Medium
IPA fonts for Japanese (JIS X 0213:2004 compliant):	IPAGothic: regular IPAPGothic: proportional regular IPAMincho: regular IPAPMincho: proportional regular	Replaced by Noto fonts starting with firmware 4.1.0 / Elementi 2016.
Nafees Web for Urdu:	Nafees Web Naskh: regular
ThaiFonts-Scalable for Thai:	Loma: book, bold, oblique and bold oblique Norasi: regular, bold, italic, oblique, bold italic and bold oblique
Un-Fonts for Korean:	UnBatang: regular and bold UnGraphic: regular and bold

Noto fonts

Google has been developing a font family called Noto, which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel. Noto is Google’s answer to "tofu" - characters that are displayed as little boxes to indicate your device doesn’t have a font to display the text. The name noto is to convey the idea that Google’s goal is to see “no more tofu”.

Noto family includes several fonts, as detailed above, and has multiple styles and weights. All Noto fonts are licensed under OFL.

Notes:

Specifying "Noto Sans" as the font family will automatically use the appropriate script specific "Noto Sans" font, falling back to "Noto Sans SC" for CJK and "Noto Kufi Arabic" for Arabic.
Not all the scripts are available in "Noto Serif". Specifying "Noto Serif" as the font family will automatically use the appropriate script specific "Noto Serif" font, falling back to "Noto Sans SC" for CJK and "Noto Naskh Arabic" for Arabic.
Not all scripts are available in italic form, when the italic form is not available synthesized oblique form will be used.

Font matching

Depending on the font family specified for a text element, the HMP selects the closest matching font that has support for the language in use. In particular it should be noted that:

When using the generic font family names "sans-serif", "serif", and "monospace", a font which has a matching style and support for the language is selected. See also the notes above on Noto fonts.
Some fonts contain multiple files for the different style variants of the font (e.g., Bold / Narrow / Italic) - usually just one font is added to the font list in Elementi / HMD, nevertheless, the appropriate font variant is selected depending on the style settings used to format the text.
If a font, that is not installed on the HMP, is used within the content, the player will substitute it with one from the built-in list, depending on the custom font family. To avoid this, add the custom font within the content.

Before firmware 4.1 / Elementi 2016, the default font family in Elementi / HMD when creating a new text element is Arial; it should be noted that:

When using characters that are not supported by this font they are displayed with a font that does have them - for instance, Chinese characters would be displayed with the AR PL New Sung font.
When using languages that are supported by multiple fonts, make sure to select the font family that matches your language, instead of leaving the default (Arial). For instance, when typing Japanese characters not supported by Arial font, the HMP will often select Chinese AR PL New Sung font - to avoid this, select one the the fonts with Japanese support, like IPAGothic.

Custom fonts

Beside the built-in fonts, additional fonts can also be added (some limits apply!) inside the content in order to be used on the HMP. A particular font might be required in order to follow a corporate identity, for a particular language, or simply to differentiate / highlight a part of the text.

Warning:

The HMP cannot load fonts from an external location, thus any custom font(s) must exist locally on the HMP - see below how to do this. This limitation also applies for an HMP device using Client/Server mode or a plug & play USB drive content.

Hare are some examples of custom fonts:

Unicode fonts from SIL (like Andika, Ezra, Harmattan, Tai Heritage etc.) useful for languages used in different parts of the world (East and Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa).
Font Awesome for displaying icons.
"Crazy" fonts like Bronx ByStreets, Toxia etc.;
All-caps fonts displaying all the characters in uppercase. See also 15 gorgeous free all caps fonts.

Add custom fonts using Elementi

To add one or more custom fonts onto the HMP using Elementi, follow these steps:

Open the project in Elementi.
Right-click inside the Browse panel and select "Add Font..." option.
- Alternatively, click on the "Menu" icon on the toolbar and select "Projects" > "Add Font..." option.
The "Add custom font" dialog opens, allowing browsing for custom font files on your PC.
The fonts already installed on your PC are usually located in the Window's installation folder (for example C:\Windows\Fonts).
Select the custom font files you want to import and click the "OK" button.
A "fonts" collection is automatically created in the root of the project, containing the selected custom fonts; these fonts are automatically added into the built-in list of fonts and can be used for any text layer within that project.
To use these custom fonts on the HMP, simply publish the project onto the HMP.

Warning:

If another method is used to add custom fonts, like drag & dropping a folder inside the project, make sure that the folder is named "fonts" (spelled with lowercase!), otherwise the HMP won't use the custom fonts.

Add custom fonts using Fusion

To add custom fonts on an HMP running Fusion, you need to create a Fusion Style Pack, and include the custom fonts into the "fonts" collection, as described above.

Add custom fonts using HMD

To add a custom font onto the HMP using HMD, follow these steps:

Create a new collection (folder) in the root of your HMD project.
Name it as "fonts" (case sensitive!).
Drag & drop your custom fonts (.ttf and .otf files) from Windows explorer to the "fonts" folder.
- If you get a "Case mismatch" error, copy the desired font into another folder before importing it into your project.
Publish your project to HMP.

Troubleshooting

Font limits

The total file size of fonts simultaneously in use on the HMP device cannot exceed:

100 MB for DiVA, HMP300 and HMP350 devices;
30 MB for HMP200 devices;
20 MB for HMP130 and HMP100 devices.

When the limit is exceeded, some characters might not be displayed - in this case, the failed loading face error message can be found in the player.log - for instance:

ERROR spx.svglib.paint - Unknown error : failed loading face 0 from '/usr/share/fonts/fireflysung/fireflysung.ttf'

Variable fonts

When using different styles of a font family (e.g., Arial with bold and regular characters), multiple font files are used, one for each variant (see details above). The Variable font format, which allows one font file to contain multiple stylistic variations, is only supported on HMP400/W.

Using a variable font on the previous player models, would trigger errors like these in the player.log:

ERROR spx.svglib.paint.kado - Font face[3]: The font face cannot be created: error: 264.
ERROR spx.svglib.paint.kado - Surface[130] (AYCrCb 1942x197): The glyphs cannot be shown: error: 1.

The solution is to import all the "static" font files for the styles used in your project, instead of the variable font file.

Character spacing

For vertical spacing, add empty lines (eventually using smaller font size) or set the lineIncrement attribute to a numeric value from Layer Properties > Advanced tab.

For horizontal spacing, use a custom font that offers a larger spacing between characters.

Note that letter-spacing and word-spacing attributes from SVG 1.1 specification are not supported.