Family punchups

[J. Landman Gay]

Peter Alcibiades wrote:

> Possibly Jacque's font problem could be caused by some Linux installs not 
> having the fonts you're using, and doing substitution? 

Yes, I'm sure that is the issue. It was pretty obvious when I looked at 
the field properties in my stack under Ubuntu. There is a difference in 
behavior with the Linux engine though, probably due to the fact that it 
is so far behind the other releases.

I knew I'd need an installed font to make it look right, and the scripts 
already branch to accomodate different platforms. A handler sets up the 
field properties depending on what's available in the OS. The problem I 
have is that if there is no consistent font in any Linux disto, I'm 
stuck as to what font to assign. The fields need to have a large display 
textsize. If the font is not available, it defaults not only to an 
unknown substitution font, but the textsize reduces to 10 point. In the 
context of my stack, the appearance is horrible. So I definitely need to 
know what fonts to assign at openstack so that the resizing won't happen.

After looking at the fontnames, I made a guess that "Sans" would be a 
universal system setting and that by replacing the textfont property 
with "Sans" for Linux, any distro would substitute the user's sans-serif 
system choice. That didn't happen. I don't know if Rev is just 
interpreting "sans" as a real font name, or if my assumptions about what 
should happen are wrong.

It would be great, if you know it, to hear whether there are any 
universal fonts or font settings across distros. I think the font issue 
is one of the biggest that cross-platform stack developers would need to 
address.

By the way, your posts are invaluable. I am saving every one of them, 
and I hope you write lots more. I know you feel you are talking to your 
grandmother, but for some of us, that's exactly the level we need. I 
very much appreciate the time you've taken to write up your extensive 
thoughts and I hope you'll keep going. Thanks very much.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com