So trying to cut this file on the laser: 
See how it comes out all wacky looking? Somehow, it looks fine on Inkscape (both in my PC and in the space’s PC)… but look screwed up on Adobe Illustrator and on Ruby:
I get it that there’s somethin goin on w/ the fonts, but why? I changed all the fonts to fonts that I’m sure the space has… I even changed some of them to Arial, and it still is complaining! What gives?
(I’m an absolute beginner, but want to try to be helpful)
What if you convert the text objects to paths instead in inkscape?
I get that by doing so you’ll forfeit the ability to edit the text later, but you could mitigate that by saving two copies of the svg, one with text and one with only paths - my understanding is that the paths will then allow you to be 100% sure that one programs interpretation of the design will be the same as anothers
Yessir! I guess that solves the problem… take a look. I guess my question remains… why is there stupidity w/ the fonts!?
That’s an age old question… it’s all to do with different user interface styles, font interpretation, rendering differences etc. It’s (partly) what makes web design so hard across different browsers/devices…
flashbacks to moving a Word document and finding all the line breaks had changed
SVG as a standard is not very precise (or indeed says much at all) when it comes to fonts, but WebFonts are actually SVG themselves so you might have more luck with them regarding document portability.
It would be nice to be able to save a document with paths for text, and retain the metadata about the text that those paths represent though.
Back in the day I saw this fairly regularly with things like PDF, they bake some fonts into the program so if the OS doesn’t have it they can use it but nothing else can
All of this is when discussing fonts that don’t exist in the new computer. But I changed the font to Arial! Why is there still a problem?
I’m going to explore this tonight. Amit, can you upload the original that had the issues with the fonts, so I can take a look?
it should be there w/ my first post? It’s the weird looking thingie that’s not an image per se
Cool. I forgot that SVG files just embed themselves in the discourse page!
I just downloaded the file and opened it in Inkscape.
“Actual” is displayed as Gill Sans Ultra Bold on my laptop.
I then opened it with Edge web browser, and it displayed the same as it did in Chrome on the discourse page
I think the reason is that the SVG is being displayed in a web browser engine, which no longer supports fonts called from within the SVG itself, even if the font is present on the local PC.
If I convert the text to a path, the SVG shows correctly in Edge.
Traditionally web-safe fonts - Arial, Verdana etc seem to work well in terms of text size and shape, but the alignment is still seriously off.
Since Ruby also runs in the web browser, it probably has the same limitations.
So, in summary, and probably true, always convert all fonts to paths.
I’m unable to replicate the weird text positioning.
However, it resolves itself when the text is converted to a path.
I’m definitely not an svg expert, but looked around a bit. I ran it through https://iconly.io/tools/svg-cleaner and opened the resultant and it had some weird text positioning. I saw the difference between the cleaned and the original on the “PREDICTED” text was
sodipodi:role="line"
If you remove that in the original, you’ll break it. That looks like an artefact from older versions of inkscape, but looks like it’s perhaps non-“standard”.
So perhaps you can start with the “cleaned” version and make it the way you want, and then that might at least show the same on all machines/renders.
There is a lot of potential noise in the rest of the text/tspan elements, so you could also potentially nuke all the text formats and start over on those as well. Probably getting beyond the point where it’s worth it 
Thanks for all the sleuthing you all! Indeed… maybe the best thing is just to write it into the cheatsheet that if I’m doing ANYTHING WITH ANYTHING I should only be working with paths. It’s just safer.
We should put that into a cheatsheet
I did some more investigation on the Laser PC, using Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, and the latest version of Ruby (installed last night). I was unable to replicate any of the font and layout issues present in Amit’s file.
Amit’s file from the first post still misbehaves. All new files that I created worked fine, no matter what font I used and no matter the positioning, text alignment etc!
I didn’t need to convert fonts to paths.
huh… so my Inkscape is busted? Should I reinstall inkscape and create a new file to see if I can reproduce the issue?
So there is a relatively simple replication test.
You displayed the SVG in Inkscape and it worked.
You displayed it in AI and the alignment was wrong.
If you open the file in Edge browser it should be broken in the same way as AI.
So, try making a new SVG and checking it in AI and Edge.
