Family punchups

[Peter Alcibiades]

Yes, fonts are an issue.  In rev itself, on Debian, fonts don't seem to work 
completely properly.  But yet they work just fine on Mandriva.  I don't know 
why.  Its not surprising there is an issue with compiled applications in some 
distros.

My own little app, its written on Debian and then moved to Mandriva because 
that's what the users have.  It works just fine (not that it is very 
demanding).  In fact it works identically which is a relief.  But the objects 
aren't aligned in quite the same way.  For instance, two side by side fields 
that fit perfectly on Debian seem to overlap just a bit on Mandriva.  Even 
the button legends in the same standard font seem to vary a bit in size.  
I've started leaving more space than really seems necessary around objects, 
but don't know how to handle the font issue other than again making the 
objects a bit bigger. 

Possibly Jacque's font problem could be caused by some Linux installs not 
having the fonts you're using, and doing substitution?  For instance, you 
can't assume they have the MS fonts - tahoma and so on.  Many people will 
install them after installing the distro, but none will come with them out of 
the box for licensing reasons.  Maybe you have to restrict the range of fonts 
used to ones you can be sure they have?  There may also be an issue about 
paths.  If you supply fonts, but the place where you put your fonts is not on 
the path of your user for fonts, then your app won't find them.  A general 
recipe for fixing this in Rev is going to need someone more expert than me 
though.

If doing this for a living, the solution has to be multi-boot for testing.  
Its not very hard.  Just start out with a clean big disk.  Then partition it 
for the first install to leave a lot of free space, and have the second and 
later installs use free space.  Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Slackware.  
Maybe Mandriva, though reports vary on 2007.  You can pick which you want to 
boot from at startup.  A bit like making sure you're OK on Tiger as well as 
Leopard, or XP SP1 as well as SP2.  Or now, Vista.   Then tell your users it 
is tested on XYZ.  

I'll write a longer post on Rev on Linux in a day or so.  But do remember, 
this is an amateur at programming and at Rev writing.  Its what Dan Shafer 
calls an inventive user.  Its not a real Linux guru/sysadmin.  You have been 
warned!

Peter

Jacque wrote:
>For example, I just ran one of my stacks in Ubuntu and the fonts
> I'd assigned were all wrong. If every Linux user is running a different
> distro, are there any ways to make our stacks look at least somewhat
> decent on anyone's machine? Any suggestions about this?