Mac -> Win problems

[Phil Davis]

Charles Hartman wrote:
> I've got an app (about 500kb) mostly finished in OSX, in DreamCard. I  
> just got access to the Win XP machine I use to test x-platform apps.  I 
> have three problems, and I'd be grateful for suggestions. The first  two 
> are (I'm guessing) known and not too hard, though I don't see  anything 
> in the docs to cover them. The third one I suspect may be  hard enough 
> to make me wish I hadn't started on this project.
> 
> PROBLEM 1: ...
> 
> PROBLEM 2: ...
> 
> PROBLEM 3: One interactive tutorial works like this: In Courier (for  
> the sake of monospaced alignment between lines) there's a line of  text, 
> with a line of marks over it. The marks, in various  combinations at 
> various times, are covered up by opaque, borderless  fields, which are 
> hidden (revealing the mark below) in response to  mouse-clicks. But on 
> WinXP, though the font is the same (Courier  New), the size is 
> different! So the mark-hiding fields don't cover  their marks.

Hi Charles,

Even if you use Courier New and you find the Win and Mac equivalent 
textSizes, you'll still encounter the issue of different text origin 
points in the field on the respective platforms. (By 'origin point' I 
mean the x:y coordinate within the field where you would find the 
bottomLeft pixel of the first character in the field.)

You can manage the text origin issue a couple of ways:

- you can apply one set of field margins for Mac and another for Windows.

- you can position the field at different locs on the different platforms.

- you can display a screenshot of the field and not the field itself. 
This is my current favorite, because it's air-tight as long as (1) 
you're only dealing with screen displays, not printing, and (2) the 
displayed text will never need to be selected or edited by the end user. 
This option also lets you use whatever font you like, without regard to 
cross-platform anything.


HTH -
Phil Davis