fonts: what is a "point" in Linux/Gnome?

Richmond Mathewson richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Mon Mar 1 14:01:35 EST 2010


On 01/03/2010 20:40, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> Peter Alcibiades wrote:
>
>> This is really puzzling.  The thing I do see is that Rev's IDE on 
>> Linux is
>> grotesquely small, and the dictionary font is grotesquely small.  I'm 
>> really
>> surprised in this age of political correctness that Rev considers it
>> acceptable because it must be simply unusable by a substantial 
>> minority of
>> the population.
>>
>> But I can't see that my desktop icons or panels or any other UI 
>> elements are
>> materially different in size from the way they are in Windows.  And 
>> if they
>> are, you just resize them, surely?
>
> It's not quite so simple as that if your goal is to make one layout 
> that works well on all supported platforms, as I'll explain more below.
>
>> But as to the fonts, I fired up Rev, created a stack with a field in it,
>> then put the font size to 12, and opened up OpenOffice and did the same
>> thing.  Its true.  Rev looks like its about 6 point, and OO looks 
>> normal 12
>> point.  After you find one of the few fonts they will both display!
>>
>> So which is wrong?  The answer surely must be Rev.  All other 
>> applications
>> on Linux work just fine and display the fonts in the same way.  Rev 
>> is doing
>> something unaccountably different.
>>
>> Its exactly the same as which fonts they display.  All the other apps 
>> find
>> the same fonts.  Its exactly the same as desktops, all the other apps 
>> allow
>> them to be used.
>>
>> Its not Linux.  Its not even Gnome, because it doesn't matter which 
>> window
>> manager you use.  Its Rev.  Its got to be fixed.
>
> I'm not sure it's so easy to dismiss Rev as the culprit here.  Nor may 
> it be so simple to just say "Gnome is wrong!" either.  It may be 
> something more complex.
>
> I took a minute this morning to take some screen shots of Rev and OS 
> controls on Ubuntu/Gnome, Win XP, and OS X:
>
> <http://fourthworldlabs.com/revfonts/>

Frankly, Richard, it looks as though you took quite some time and gave 
quite a lot of thought to that,
and "took a minute" is somewhat of an understatement.

It is a really good comparison: Thanks.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have been having a love-affair with Apple's Charcoal font since OS 9, 
and as such use it for ALL
my buttons regardless of what platform/OS I deploy on. How does "that 
screaming genius" manage
that? we ask ourselves.

Like many things in life the answer comes in 2 parts:

1. He's not a screaming genius, he's largely a lazy slob who likes to 
make things easy for himself.

2. He makes the buttons up on a Mac with Charcoal.ttf installed and 
exports all to snapshot and uses
PNG files as fake buttons.

No fonts doing silly things, no conniption fits, no high-speed flying 
PCs going through windows . . .  :)

Fields . . .  Erm, Yes, Well

However, on a CD I made and marketed about 5 years ago (Hey, have now 
made enough on it to
cover the initial costs - a real screaming genius) for 14 years olds to 
practise their Bulgarian literature
(Big market that . . .  ) having to have absolutely buckets of Bulgarian 
(Cyrillic) text in some 50 +
fields to be deployed across Windows 95 thru XP, I made images of the 
texts, grouped each one,
constrained it and added scrollbars.

Editable text fields are going to be a headache on Linux unless you have 
a copper-bottomed guarantee
that ALL your end-users are going to have the fonts you want installed 
somewhere (X11 fonts???) where
RunRev will see them.

Sanskrit fonts . . .  ERM, YES, WELL.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>
> You'll note that on those shots Rev's understanding of text size seems 
> to match that of Firefox almost perfectly, even as both Win and Linux 
> report very different sizes for their OS controls.
>
> My closing observation there sums up the more significant problem:
>
>     Even with the disparity of reported rendered textSize, it's
>     possible to make layouts that substantially conform to OS
>     standards rather easily for Mac and Win, and the text and
>     control sizes of each are close enough that a single layout
>     will work well on both platforms.
>
>     Ubuntu/Gnome, however, uses control and text size so far out
>     of proportion to other OS standards that they require either
>     delivering layouts sized smaller than the user sees in other
>     apps on that OS, or making a separate set of layouts specifically
>     for that OS.
>
> It's been a while since I've maintained Linux distros here other than 
> Ubuntu/Gnome, so it would be interesting to learn if this vastly 
> disproportionate default control size is unique to Ubuntu or to Gnome.
>
> I would imagine that KDE, with it's tendency to mimic the Win look and 
> feel to some degree, may have control sizes more in keeping with other 
> common OS norms.
>
> But it would be interesting to find other Gnome-based distros which 
> have control sizes that more closely fit those on Win and Mac.
>
> FWIW, if I recall correctly the Gnome control sizes I see in Ubuntu 
> are roughly the same as I used to see in Motif and Irix.
>

It is not the job of the Linux people to make their OS GUIs conform to 
some real or imaginary standard
established by either Apple or Microsoft, any ore than the other way around.

The downside of this is that it is up to individual developers to tailor 
their standalones to run on
those different operating systems.

This is why I keep r-e-p-e-a-t-i-n-g that building a standalone for a 
target OS on another OS always
involves quite a bit of risk.

> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World
>  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
>  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
>  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
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