font finding in OSX produces 200+ lines of warnings

@denis-bz

          @anntzer, on my macos 10.15.7 Catalina

system_profiler -xml SPFontsDataType  2>&1    # <- def _get_macos_fonts() in mpl 3.9.0

💥

2024-05-17 11:56:24.964 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AlBayanPUA", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.964 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Set a breakpoint on CTFontLogSystemFontNameRequest to debug.
2024-05-17 11:56:24.968 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AlBayanPUA-Bold", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.972 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AlNilePUA", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.975 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AlNilePUA-Bold", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.978 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AlTarikhPUA", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.982 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AppleColorEmojiUI", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.985 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AppleSDGothicNeoI-Regular", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.988 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AppleSDGothicNeoI-Medium", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
2024-05-17 11:56:24.991 system_profiler[1061:15889] CoreText note: Client requested name ".AppleSDGothicNeoI-Light", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].
...

200-odd such lines.
So I reinstalled matplotlib==3.8.4.
Please advise: are there functions in font_manager.py I can call to help debug this
or caches / .jsons I can delete ? Thanks

Originally posted by @denis-bz in #27230 (comment)

Should the title be "font finding in OSX 10.15 ..." ?
MacOS_version_history says it's an "old version", not even "Older version, still maintained".
(Is there info on macos-versions-tested someplace ?

Oughta be in METADATA.

Added: https://endoflife.date/macos https://endoflife.date/python ... give a little more info;
ahhh, planned obsolescence ...

Do we know it is osx version specific?

This does not happen for 14.x (Sonoma). Catalina is quite old - not sure when the difference would have come in.

edit Sunday 19 May:
Folks,
until this is reproduced on other Macos versions, I'd drop it to low low priority --
better things to do than try to decipher these murky error messages (I got nowhere).
A workaround that works for me is to just ignore stderr in
font_manager.py _get_macos_fonts, instead of check_output --

@lru_cache
def _get_macos_fonts():
    p = subprocess.Popen( "system_profiler -xml SPFontsDataType" .split(),
            stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL, text=False )
    d, = plistlib.loads( p.stdout.read() )  # not load( p.stdout )    
    items = [Path(entry["path"]) for entry in d["_items"]]
    # print( "▄ bp _get_macos_fonts", len(items) );  breakpoint()
    return items

Unfortunately I can't repro this on any of the macos versions present on GHA (which start at macos11). I suspect that the practical solution is indeed to silently ignore errors from system_profiler, at least when stdout is valid xml (i.e. we can assume that we'll still get a useful list of fonts from it).

@tacaswell

@tacaswell, folks,
pip install matplotlib to 3.11.0 seems to have hidden SPFontsDataType
so that system_profiler -xml SPFontsDataType spits out 200 lines of warnings like the above
(which I don't understand).
Worse, back to pip install matplotlib==3.10.9 doesn't help;
rm -r ~/Library/Caches doesn't help. Can a macos-font expert help me ?

_get_macos_fonts in the two font_manager.py look the same.

(This is on the same old mac 10.15, which I realize is endoflife ...)
Thanks, cheers

@denis-bz

@denis-bz - To be clear, if you run system_profile in Terminal on the 10.15 machine, you are getting the 200 lines of warnings? If so, the problem is internal to the system_profile utility and is something that Apple fixed in macOS 11 and later.

This message originates from TDescriptorSource::CopyFontDescriptorPerPostScriptName in the CoreText framework. If TDescriptorSource::ShouldSubstituteInvisibleFontName returns true, CTFontLogSystemFontNameRequest() is called and the logs print. There's a flag that suppresses this behavior, which is likely what Apple started using on macOS 11 to prevent the output.

For 10.15, I don't think there's anything that can be done other than filter out lines with "CoreText note" from stderr.

After installing macOS 10.15 Catalina and reversing the CoreText, SPFontReporter, and UIFoundation binaries, I don't think that there's any way to avoid this error. The only way is to filter out the lines that contain "CoreText note".

In 10.15, -[SPFontReporter infoForDescriptor:] always calls +[NSFont fontWithName:size:], which will always print this log message by design.

In 11.0, Apple added a check to see if the font is private (starts with a .). If true, they no longer call into +[NSFont fontWithName:size:].

Binary Ninja output from 11.0's SPFontReporter binary

@iccir

@iccir, thanks for going through these twisty passages; IOU a beverage of your choice 🍺

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font finding in OSX produces 200+ lines of warnings #28249

Oughta be in METADATA.

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font finding in OSX produces 200+ lines of warnings #28249

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denis-bz commented on May 17, 2024

Oughta be in METADATA.

tacaswell commented on May 17, 2024

jklymak commented on May 17, 2024

denis-bz commented on May 18, 2024

anntzer commented on May 20, 2024

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denis-bz commented on Jun 12, 2026

iccir commented on Jun 27, 2026

iccir commented on Jun 27, 2026

denis-bz commented on Jul 2, 2026

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