So. For context, the text tools I’ve used in the past were in MSPaint, Paint.NET, and older versions of Krita. In every single one of those, if I wanted to use any random .OTF or .TTF font on my system – for example, Vanilla Caramel, a font I’ve been using for dialogue for my characters for a good while now --, it presented a simple dropdown and I could select whatever font I wanted. And given the end result would only require that .OTF or .TTF file on my own systems (as the final product would be a .png), that was always and would always be fine and expected.
And then I upgraded from Kubuntu 24.04 LTS to Kubuntu 26.04 LTS. This upgrade came with, among other things, a free upgrade to Krita 6.0.1… which has a complete overhaul of the text tool. Among other changes, it has… this???
A “font family” dropdown, pre-set to “sans serif” which is not a name for one of the fonts on my system, apparently no other options I can select (clicking the triangle to drop down a list to choose from does nothing), and an option to select a “fallback option” as if I were making a webpage instead of an image that’s destined to be baked into raster?
What is going on, where is Vanilla_Caramel.otf, why can’t I select it, and why would I ever need a ‘fallback’ or ‘font family’ in an image editor???
…Oh joy. I just realized that the other two versions of Krita that I have readily available are the Snap version (which is a broken prerelease dev build which has its own issues ) and the Flatpak version (which also has similar issues)
…Guess I’ll have to mainline the Flatpak version for now. Ech.
In the effort of not having to permanently relive the horrors of Snap Krita, my question stands: Can someone please explain to me how the new text tool is supposed to work, and furthermore, why I would want it to work like that
You are hitting the fact the Krita 6.0.x series is considered experimental (it’s the sister release of 5.3.x but built on top of Qt 6), and I don’t know why Canonical decided it would be the version they’ll be shipping instead of 5.3.x…
Anyway, for the Font family and Fallback option, it is indeed looking alike to how fonts are declaratively defined in web environments, probably to get functionally closer to SVG, and well, also so the project can be opened on other systems without a need for export or flattening layers.
Given Canonical afaik are also in charge of Snaps, and they picked a prealpha for that, I am nnnnnot surprised.
I will, however, ask how I can get my hands on a version of Krita that isn’t a flatpak and isn’t a beta/prealpha/ect version. Because I do nnnnot want to deal with the flatpak’s insistence on not using Dolphin for file picking.
Ye, I’ve seen that thread myself, as well as had this brought up before. The file picker issues with Flatpak Krita and Snap Krita aren’t new to me; this is simply the first time Apt Krita has had issues for me.
Presumably because it’s the first time they’ve updated Krita on apt in a while and they boneheadedly picked a beta version.
