Problem displaying Unicode characters in Protege look-and-feel

[swartik]

I have an ontology with class names that contain the fi and ffi ligatures. When the look-and-feel is set to Protege, these ligatures aren't always displayed properly. I am running Windows 7, Java 8 (1.8.0_144). Csongor Nyulas has tested the ontology on Ubuntu and didn't observe the erroneous display, so the problem must be Windows-specific.

I wanted to illustrate the problem by uploading an image, but github wouldn't let me. In the protege-dev mailing list (September 2017), see the thread with the subject "Question on Protege's Unicode character rendering".

[ykazakov]

I have uploaded your screenshot. Strange that github does not let you do this.

[swartik]

Thank you. My company's firewall may well have something to do with the upload failure.

Here's the description I'd wanted to write. In the screenshot, the class name appears in two places: in the hierarchy, and in the label above the hierarchy. The first place displays it correctly, but in the label the "ffi" ligature appears as an empty rectangle.

[csnyulas]

Here is the whole thread on the mailing list, which provides more details:
http://protege-project.136.n4.nabble.com/Question-on-Protege-s-Unicode-character-rendering-td4669584.html

[matthewhorridge]

Possibly related to #818. @swartik if you have time please could you check to see if this problem is still exhibited in 5.5.0-beta-8?

[swartik]

A problem remains, unfortunately. Except it's not quite the same. Here's a screenshot from 5.5.0-beta-8:

Now the only correctly displayed name is under the ontology selector.

[matthewhorridge]

Thanks a lot @swartik. Hmmm okay. I changed the font for the render to use the font that JTextArea uses to be sure it was on the platform. Previously, it was Verdana, but on Windows this doesn't include some unicode characters that are needed for Chinese. The breadcrumb trail is actually, "Dialog", Plain, 11, which I think maps to Arial on Windows, as far as I can tell.

[matthewhorridge]

@swartik I've fixed the rendering problem in the class hierarch, I think (for the next beta). However, do the boxes show in the view title if the Look & Feel is set to the Windows Look & Feel?

[swartik]

@matthewhorridge Here's the Windows Look & Feel screenshot. The two text strings on the right are correct. The only place I see a problem is in the class hierarchy.

Thanks for dealing with this annoyance. I'll stay tuned for the next beta.

[matthewhorridge]

Thanks a lot @swartik

I think we've finally nailed down the problem. If you have a moment, please could you try the beta-9 snapshot build? It's here:

https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/edu/stanford/protege/protege-desktop/5.5.0-beta-9-SNAPSHOT/protege-desktop-5.5.0-beta-9-20190123.010908-11-platform-independent.zip

It's a bare bones build, i.e. no plugins.

[swartik]

@matthewhorridge Good work. I downloaded the snapshot build and verified that the ligature characters display correctly in all 3 look-and-feels.

[matthewhorridge]

@swartik thanks so much for testing this. Really glad to hear that it works with all L&F. I'll mark this as fixed and close the issue.