{tT}kinter
works linking to a Tk/Tcl interpreter that, loosely speaking, is contained in a couple of DLL, in particular the graphical library is libtk6.0.so
.
Most of the extra fonts not seen by tkinter
are managed by the Freetype library and Anaconda’s libtk6.0.so
is not built against Freetype…
$ ldd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtk8.6.so | grep freetype
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 (0x00007f0a24597000)
$ ldd miniconda3/lib/libtk8.6.so | grep freetype
$
I’ve tried the following, horrible thing
$ mv lib/miniconda3/lib/libtk8.6.so lib/miniconda3/lib/libtk8.6.sav
$ ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtk8.6.so lib/miniconda3/lib/libtk8.6.so
$ ipython
Python 3.6.3 |Anaconda, Inc.| (default, Nov 20 2017, 20:41:42)
Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
IPython 6.2.1 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
In [1]: from tkinter import Tk, Label ; from tkinter.font import families
In [2]: r = Tk() ; a = families() ; len(a)
Out[2]: 328
In [3]: r=Tk() ; Label(r, text="Constantia", font=("Constantia", 60)).pack()
In [4]: r.mainloop()
Final thoughts.
- Substituting the DLL is not a clean solution.
- The fonts are not exactly the same. For sure Anaconda has its own Fontconfig subsystem and possibly the directories that are scanned are different, but I have not a correct understanding of the discrepancy in the number of fonts.
- The correct course of action is to persuade Anaconda, Inc. to build
libtk
against Freetype, but I don’t know how to report to them, e.g., if I go to https://www.anaconda.com/search/issues what I see is a list of informational articles on the distribution.
Update
W.r.to point 3, I contacted via a github issue Anaconda Inc. and I was told
No we cannot do this. When building our software we need python built very early, well before anything graphical gets built. Adding Freetype as a dep for tkinter causes a cycle in the build graph and we can no longer build the distro.
Why not use something more modern than tkinter anyway?
— Ray Donnelly (aka mingwandroid)