Texts appears different on two PCs with the same EmWi project

Description:

Sometimes it happens that the same EmWi project shows different font appearance on two PCs. This isn’t a big problem if you recognize the problem on a PC of your colleague, but it can be a real problem if you send a project to a customer who wants to go in production with this project.

Solution:

The reason for this phenomenon is usually a different or missing font installed on the two PCs. In combination with the Windows font engine that is used by the EmWi resource converter, another factor makes it very hard to recognize this problem immediately. If the used font in an EmWi project is missing on another PC, the Windows font engine uses a similar font without any warning or error message.

This phenomenon can also be due to different font versions of the same font e.g. because of different Windows OS versions, or due to different language variants of the same font e.g. because of different Windows OS language. This can be easily checked by a file compare or simply by comparing the font file date, time and size.

To avoid such kind of troubles it can be helpful to include the font file in the source code repository and add a readme file that mentions that exactly this font must be installed on development PCs for this project. In any case the problem will be solved if you install the same font on both PC.

See also:

FAQ article [Some characters are not represented properly]

Keywords:

Character, glyph, missing, wrong, font, range, true type font, font engine