What are the requiremens for an external font on Gear Sport?

I am trying to get some external font into my watch face. They all fail. The elements using my fonts are shown in the designer, using the correct glyphs (characters), they are not shown in the preview (from the app), the items remain black and on the watch they’re replaced with the default font.

I guess there are some requirements on the fonts used, but it puzzles me what.

This is what I tried:

  • the supplied fonts (monserrat, roboto, arvo, dosis, orbitron, raleway etc.) work just fine
  • every font I “upload” has the same problem like described above, they’re shown in the designer but never make it to the phone
  • I tried quite a bit of the fonts. Apparently they need to be .ttf -> True Type fonts. No problem. OTF fonts are rejected (designer says: wrong extension).
  • I though it might be an issue with the fonts I am using, they’re probably incomplete or have errors, so I also tried the DejaVU.ttf font, which is very complete and used by millions daily. But that didn’t work either.

So I am now at a loss. What requirements to meet for an external “uploaded” font to make it work? Or maybe someone has an example of external font that works?

Thx.

Interesting question …

Anyone who can help?

The question has been asked before, but the guys from Facer say they can’t reproduce it and “some” fonts apparently don’t work. So then the question from me: what does a font have to be to be working.

It’s either that or the complete “upload font” mechanism is flawed. Has anybody succeeded using the “upload font” button?

Well, “upload font” is working for me, i do have several watch faces with external fonts. A few ones couldn´t be loaded or weren´t even displayed in the creator, but the others i tried worked well.

Example with fixedwidth LED-Font:

Example with Outline-Font:

Greetings,

Phantasico

Wow, you are very very advanced on this! It’s not exactly my style, but I can see many hours of time and a lot of insight here.

Can I have your LCD font and try it?

What are you using, the web client, the windows app or the mac app? I tried the windows app yesterday, but I keep hanging at loading. Also I saw the windows app actually just fires up an embedded browser (webkit), so I guess it won’t work any better than the web client anyway?

What watch are you using yourself? I have another issue with my Samsung Sport in that the “dim” variant isn’t used at all, for the AOD, the normal one is used, and dimmed a little. Does this sound familiar?

Thanks for the nice words, but i am not that advanced, lol. I am working with Facer creator since about 4 month. Still fighting with tags, parameters and logical algorythm. :wink:

For sure you can have the LED-font. How should i send it to you?

Since the offline Windows version is not working correctly anymore, i am using the web client.

I am using a Huawei-Classic in Combination with an Iphone, so i don´t know how good Samsung smartwatches work with facer. Not the best solution/combination, i know, but working all right. (Don´t like this ugly i-watch).

Greetings,

Phantasico

Okay, so you have quite a different other setup then I do. Do you have an always-on-display feature on your Huawei watch? Does it work with Facer?

For the fonts, normally I’d say send it to my e-mail adres, it accepts really large attachments, but I found that even disclosing my domain will guarantee a tsunami of spammers trying to guess my address which will load my mail server.

It’s not that I don’t want you to have my e-mail address, just not public…

Can you upload them using something like wetransfer, dropbox, google drive and send me the link using erik@mailinator.com? Very much appreciated!!!

Yes. the Huawei Watch has an always-on-display feature and it does work correct with facer. For sure i understand, that you don´t want to make your Email-adress public. Neither would i. :wink:

At the moment, i am on work so it will take a little bit time since i can access my dropbox. I don´t have the font with me. :slight_smile:
Greetings

Of course, understandable. Please give a yell here when done, then I’ll check the mailinitor account as soon as possible (and remove the mail there).

Thanks very much!

That is strange. Almost all my fonts are external and all have been working on my 200+ designs. Could something on your computer be blocking uploads?

The interesting thing is that the designed shows then correctly, so I don’t think the uploading is the problem.

I also use external fonts all times, if there is a font u want to use and is otf, you can change it to ttf, just find a font transfer, there are plenty online that are free… then it might be that your watch doesn’t allow those fonts no matter what, I have Samsung gear s2 and no outline nor glow works for my unit, it would be to confirm with facer, if u see my collection I use plenty of them, for graphics, I’m using photoshop mix on the iPad, very easy to use for creating photo compositions… and look into tutorials here in the community, there is a lot of help here

I am using original TTF fonts anyway.

And I can confirm that glow and outlines don’t work, not even on internal/supplied fonts.

But I could live with that, the fact that I can’t use external fonts and that AOD doesn’t work is a showstopper.

It must be the difference in watches. I’m using uploaded fonts as well as the outline. I have not needed or tried the glow to see if it gets published.

Can anyone point me to a free font that he/she knows is working? I have tried douzens now and none work. Preferrably a “LCD” type font.

Also is anyone using a Gear Sport, maybe that’s the problem?

The uploaded font shows correctly in the designer, but when uploaded, the app doesn’t show it and the watch replaces it with a default font.

I published my problematic watchface, so others can try. My user id is “erik_1”, watch face is called “mini1”. I hoped it would help, but no.

The interesting thing is that if you browse to the watchface, in the list with matching faces it has the correct font. If you then click on it and select it, the font is gone.

Here already the font is wrong, it should be LCD-look. On the watch itself it’s yet another font, sans-serif (here it shows a serif font).

Sorry that i am answering late, but i had much to do the last week.

Here is a link to the LCD Font thats working for me…

I hope it works - never worked with dropbox before.

Greetings, Phantasico

Hi Phantasico. Don’t be sorry, I am very grateful for your help. The font looks great!

It just doesn’t work, just like every other external font.

So here we have established that the font itself is not the problem, that’s at least one step.

In the meantime I’ve been very busy monitoring the traffic between my web browserver and the facer.io to make sure no traffic is dropped or rejected. I even configure for all traffic to facer.io to bypass my proxy and connect to the ip directly. It all doesn’t matter.

It very much looks like a specific issue with the newer Gear Sport device support. Sad…

Thank you for your help!