Getting Fonts to display correctly in Linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

Jacque wrote:

>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.

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First, the way you check whether its going to work is, fire up the Rev IDE on 
the distro of your choice, create a field, put a word in it in 48 point, and 
then pick the various fonts the IDE offers.  If it displays correctly, you 
must be OK. 

When I do this on Debian, there are only two fonts that display properly at 
sizes over 24 point: Bitstream Charter and Courier 10point.  The behaviour 
Jacque reports occurs with the rest, you pick a too large font, and it 
defaults to 10 point.  It does this at very small sizes too by the way, 
defaulting upwards.

Now, this is almost certainly a peculiarity of Rev's interaction with the 
distro, not the distro itself or just Rev.  First because this installation 
has all the fonts that do not display properly.  Second because on a Mandriva 
2006 installation, using the IDE, all the fonts display fine.  Third because 
all fonts display properly in all other applications.

Ubuntu being Deb based in origin could be expected to have the same problem.  
I haven't been able to track down what it is due to.

The answer to the question, which fonts can you count for sure on having in a 
modern Linux distro is:

Bitstream Charter
Bitstream Vera family
Century Schoolbook
Luxi
Nimbus
URW Palladio
URW Bookman
URW Chancery
URW Gothic
Utopia

However, its a bit misleading, since the fact that they are installed does not 
mean that Rev can always get at them!

For more than you ever wanted to know on Linux fonts go to:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Font-HOWTO/    which is where the above list came from.

But this is probably not going to help very much because its so Linux specific 
and not Rev specific.  

In the short term, I'd have a go restricting the app to Bitstream Charter and 
Courier 10pt and see if this helps.  And hope that the next release of the 
Linux engine, which presumably will mean a new release of the compilation 
function in the Mac and Windows 2.7/8 versions, will fix it.

Peter