Bold font not working on MacOS

LightBurn Software Questions OS Specific
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1

Hi everyone. I recently switched from windows to mac. I’m currently running lightburn version 1.7.07 on mac mini m1 MacOS Sequoia, MAX fiber laser 30 w 200 lens.

I don’t know why but “bold” function on font toolbar does not work with some fonts. Many of these are Google fonts like Allura or Great Vibes. Bold function worked well on windows. What am i doing wrong?

Thank you for your help.

2

Lightburn only uses True Type and SHX fonts. I do not think Google fonts are either of those.

3

Google fonts are .ttf TrueType fonts. They regularly work in lightburn except for the bold function. Italic funtion works, but bold doesn’t. It is really weird and i think it’s a software bug that should be immediately addressed.

4

Are you sure what you got?

the files they provide are in the TrueType Format (TTF) and other web-optimized formats like WOFF and WOFF2, not exclusively TrueType.

Upload the font here (add .txt to the filename) and others can experiment with it.

5

Allura-Regular.ttf.txt (228,8 KB)

That’s the font i’ve downloaded from google (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Allura) and that i’ve currently installed on my Mac. As i previously stated it works well with italic, but not with bold.

6

I tested it in Win10 on LB v1.7.07 and have attached the Lightburn file. I wrote the text, then changed the properties with the Edit Text Shape box.

It works here, so it may be a MAC thing with that font.

Allura Test.lbrn2 (182.1 KB)

7

There are a few things going on concurrently:

  1. The name of the font indicates one of the issues. “Allura-Regular.ttf”. This indicates that only the Regular version of the file (ie non-bold) exists in that file. That means no Bold version is availble.
  2. From memory, I don’t believe dynamic fonts are available in Mac for LightBurn. By dynamic in this case I’m referring to fonts that allow for multiple font weights in a single file vs static single file per weight. So on Mac you would need an explicit Bold font for this to work.
  3. Allura doesn’t seem to be available in anything but static variant from Google and only for Regular. So there is no available option.
  4. I’m making an assumption but seems like LightBurn for Mac has no method by which automatic synthetic bold variation can be generated from non-bold fonts. I’d argue in most cases that this is a good thing.

TLDR: if you want a bold font on Mac you need to get static fonts that include a bold variant at least on current 1.7.x prod versions.

I’m going from memory on this so it’s possible some of this information is outdated or partly incorrect.