Rotated text in SVGs have incorrect font in Draw and exported PDFs

maridoodle · September 10, 2025, 12:59am

Version of LibreOffice used is 25.8.1.1 (I recently updated to see if this bug got fixed)

I added an SVG of a map which I created myself in Inkscape to a LibreOffice Draw document and the font of some text is incorrect both in Draw itself and in PDFs exported with it.

This issue only occurs with text which is rotated for whatever reason. Non-rotated text in an SVG displays with the correct font.

I’ve prepared some image references to showcase the issue, as I believe this is something that is easier to explain with visuals.

As I’m limited to only a single image as a first time forum user (I only just found this out and had to rewrite my message) I had to make a mashup of all the images I want to show into a single image. Sorry that it’s so messy looking.

Here you can hopefully see that while non-rotated text appears correctly in all versions, rotated text randomly becomes a broken or given an incorrect font.

This is a big problem for me as this map is very important to how people are going to be using this document, and the weird font unexpectedly applied to this text is less readable when zoomed out then my intended font choice is.

I would love some help with this issue.

Thank you LibreOffice team for all the work you do!

EarnestAl · September 10, 2025, 1:38am

Do you have the original font on the computer with LibreOffice?

If you do then it might have acquired a slightly different name in Inkscape/SVG. If the name appears in italics in the font selection box in Properties then the font is not found and a substitute is being used.

You can use the font substitution table to replace the slightly renamed font with the correct font.

Click Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Fonts
Tick the box Apply replacement table
In the Font field, enter the name of the font as it appears in the font box when you click on it, e.g. CandaraLt, then in the Replace with field, select a font from your installed fonts, e.g. Candara Light. Click the green tick to add the substitution.
In the panel tick the box in the Always column. OK

maridoodle · September 11, 2025, 9:12am

The font being used in the SVG is Liberation Sans which came installed with my Linux distro. I made the SVG and the Draw document with the same computer, and I am using this same font Liberation Sans for all of the text of the LibreOffice Draw document with no issues.

In fact, even in the SVG the only text with issues is specifically rotated text in the SVG. Non-rotated text in the SVG is unaltered.

I couldn’t find any evidence that the font got a different name in LibreOffice than in Inkscape using that Fonts menu in options, but then again maybe I misunderstood how to use it.

Given you mentioned an example where there would be different font names due to font weight, I feel I should mention this font has only Regular and Bold weights. I can confirm weights both work non-rotated (you can see both in the “Legend” example in my original post), and the rotated text is the default “Regular”.

I should also note that it is not possible (at least with this SVG, maybe one without a background or something might be different) to select text within the SVG using LibreOffice Draw for me to be able to see if the text would be in italics in the font selection box. I assumed this is standard for all SVGs in LibreOffice (or at least Draw), and while that is not a problem for use it does make that first troubleshooting step you suggested impossible for me to perform.

Thank you for trying to help. I do appreciate it.

Mary