Issues with the registry font keys / entries

[Mihai Todor]

Hi Huw,

Thank you very much for the detailed explanations! Basically, this
validates the cleanup work that Austin and myself did in Winetricks
and it's great to know that we made the right assumptions, especially
the wineserver wait trick.

Enjoy the Holidays!

Best regards,
Mihai

On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 8:53 AM, Huw Davies <Huw.Davies at physics.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 19 Dec 2017, at 20:30, Mihai Todor <todormihai at gmail.com> wrote:
>> First of all, there is some logic somewhere in Wine which
>> automagically populates `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache` when font
>> files are copied into `.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts/`. The magic seems
>> to be based on inotify, but I don't understand well enough how it
>> works.
>
> When a Wine session (instance of wineserver) starts the first process
> that needs access to fonts creates a font list and saves this information
> under the above key.  Further processes read the data from the key and
> so save time not having the create the font list from scratch.
>
> The code that creates the font list is in dlls/gdi32/freetype.c:init_font_list()
> You’ll see that fonts within c:\windows\fonts are added to that list.
>
>> However, there seems to be a race issue between apps like regedit and
>> notepad and the above mechanism. For example, if I have the corefonts
>> installers cached under `.cache/winetricks/` and I run `winetricks
>> corefonts` and I start notepad immediately after, I notice that the
>> new fonts are not available. Worse, most times (not sure yet how to
>> reproduce it all the time) if I run regedit just after, the new fonts
>> never get added to `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache`, which seems to be
>> the place from where Wine lists fonts through EnumFontFamiliesEx (try
>> running this code
>> https://github.com/kamwoods/FontAnalysis/blob/d894c082221912e72653ae76804a72f70c181861/FontFinder/FontFinder/FontFinder.cpp
>> just after installing corefonts). This happens on wine-3.0-rc2 and
>> older.
>>
>> Is this the expected behaviour?
>
> Yes, see above.  You’ll need to let the wineserver shut down after adding the fonts.
> After that, subsequent invocations will recreate the font list and things should work as
> expected.
>
>> I'm also wondering why Wine doesn't also write the required entries
>> under `HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows[\ NT]?\CurrentVersion\Fonts`
>> when it populates `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache`. Is this a bug? Is
>> there a different way of registering fonts that Winetricks should use?
>> I'd be more than happy to remove this manual registry insertion code
>> from Winetricks…
>
> It doesn’t do that, because Windows doesn’t do it that way.  You need to
> add the registry key to have Windows see the font.  This is normally done
> by the font installer, which winetricks in by-passing...
>
>> And, I also noticed that a fresh wine install on Ubuntu 16 will
>> auto-populate both `HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows[\
>> NT]?\CurrentVersion\Fonts` keys with the following fonts:
>> Courier -> coure.fon
>> MS Sans Serif -> sserife.fon
>> MS Serif -> serife.fon
>> Small Fonts -> smalle.fon
>>
>> If I look in `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache`, I see that they are
>> located in `/opt/wine-devel/bin/../share/wine/fonts/`, so shouldn't
>> the above entries also point to the same location? And maybe not all
>> apps will like the `..` in the font path…
>
> Fonts without a path correspond to c:\windows\fonts.  These files
> should be installed into that directory.
>
>> And, since we're here, I noticed that Winetricks registers font
>> replacements under `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Replacements`, but
>> doesn't add any entries to `HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows
>> NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes`. Does Wine completely ignore this
>> key?
>
> No, font replacements are a Wine extension:
>
> From dlls/gdi32/freetype.c:
>
>   The replacement list is a way to map an entire font family onto
>   another family.  For example adding
>
>   [HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Replacements]
>   "Wingdings"="Winedings"
>
>   would enumerate the Winedings font both as Winedings and
>   Wingdings.  However if a real Wingdings font is present the
>   replacement does not take place.
>
>
> This is different from how FontSubstitutes work, which are essentially
> just aliases for facenames and optionally charsets.
>
> Huw.
>