fonts - DejaVu Sans Condensed not showing up in Inkscape, despite installed

My system came with DejaVu Sans and DejaVu Sans Condensed installed by default.

PROBLEM: Inkscape only shows DejaVu Sans.

• Do I have to configure something special in Inkscape?


• Or is DejaVu Sans Condensed supposed to be obtained by selecting DejaVu Sans and pressing Toggle bold or normal weight?


• Or am I misundertanding something about fonts?

Answer

The Inkscape text toolbar only allows you to select the font family and size, and to toggle bold and italic type, but it doesn't include any way to select a specific font variant. This has actually been reported as a bug in Inkscape, and should be fixed in the next version (0.49).

In order to select a specific font variant in current versions of Inkscape, you need to open the Text and Font dialog, either via the Text menu or by pressing Shift+Ctrl+T. This will open a floating dialog window that looks like this:

Note that this dialog is currently not dockable, although that should also be fixed in Inkscape 0.49.