Exported Watermark Different from what's seen on Darktable

Hello all,

I’ve been experiencing some anomalies when exporting my images with a custom watermark. Sometimes the SVG text (path) comes out with missing letters, or it’s spaced out differently from how I see it in darkroom. I haven’t gotten a clue as to why this is happening so I resorted to re-editing the SVG file to reposition the text element and then re-export until by some chance I get a “usable” output although still not the same as seen in the darkroom module. Rinse & repeat, I’ve been doing this for over a month now, so you can imagine the frustration aside from having to segregate Portrait vs Landscape and set different Watermark styles just to cater to these separately.

Tonight, I may have isolated a probable cause. I’ve been recently managing my images out of a shared folder on OneDrive so that I’m not tied up to a single machine for continuing my post-processing. I paused OD sync for a few hours and then when I exported it seems that the problem went away. Could this be the actual cause and does anyone share a similar predicament?

Thanks! ~ Mike [Win 10, DT 2.4.0rc0]

Its hard to say that file syncing is the cause, and since I’m sure nobody knows what one drive sync actually does, it’ll be even more difficult.

I’d suggest in your svg that you outline your fonts, that’ll ensure that the letters are all there as you see them.

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I also don’t think that syncing your files has anything to do with the problem you are describing. It’s most likely a bug in librsvg, the library darktable uses to render SVG files. I’d suggest to

  • update to a more recent version of darktable and
  • turn your text into paths in the watermark file.
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