Developing on Mac, standalone on Windows

[Ken Ray]

On Jan 22, 2012, at 11:55 PM, Pete wrote:

> I just compiled and ran my fist standalone on Windows and I'm finally
> realising the benefits of developing cross platform applications with LC.
> I was pretty amazed when everything I developed on my Mac just ran as
> expected on Windows!
> 
> The on;y problem I need to address concerns fonts.  I have a very few
> controls that depend on font size to correctly position themselves around
> other, non-textobjects and it seems that LC's default font on WIndows is
> different than on a Mac, or at least the font size/spacing is.
> 
> I left the font and size blank in almost all of my controls' text
> formatting options but perhaps I need to name a specific font to have
> things line up correctly on OS X and Windows?

Are you setting font names anywhere in your app or are you defaulting to the system fonts for everything? There are generally three schools of thought on font/platform management: 

1) Use LC's built in property profiles. It's been a long time since I used them, and I came up with my own solution, so I don't really know the pros and cons. (Maybe someone else could fill this in?)

2) Pick a font that will be on all your target systems, and set the font of your stack(s) to that font, allowing it to be inherited by all cards and card objects.
	- Pros: Easy to set up and implement
	- Cons: Significant limitations on font choices; your controls will not end up being displayed in OS-compliant fonts; every control that has a separate style (like bold) will break the inheritance and you'll have to set those manually.

3) Set the font for your controls by hand, based on platform.
	- Pros: More control over what's happening; can apply the same text attributes to multiple objects by code without having to set individual properties on the controls (unless you want to)
	- Cons: Takes a little time to code and set up

I have been using for a long time a frontscript that traps 'preOpenCard', and then just runs through the controls on the card in a repeat loop, setting the appropriate text attributes. For those controls that need custom styling (like bold, etc.), I check a custom property set and apply the styles/sizes/colors if it has them. Here's a scaled-down example of what I mean:

-- Frontscript 
on preOpenCard
  repeat with x = 1 to the number of controls of this card
    put the customProperties["uTextAttribs"] of control x of this card into tAttribsA
    put "font,style,size,color" into tAttribs
    repeat for each item tAttrib in tAttribs
      if tAttribsA[tAttrib] <> "" then
         do "set the text" & tAttrib && "of control x of this card to tAttribsA[tAttrib]"
      else
         do "set the text" & tAttrib && "of control x of this card to TextAttribs(tAttrib)"
      end if
    end repeat
  end repeat
  pass preOpenCard
end preOpenCard 

function TextAttribs pAttrib
  put "font,style,size,color" into tAttribs
  switch (the platform)
    case "MacOS"
      put "Lucida Grande,plain,12,black" into tSysAttribs
      break
    case "Win32"
      if (word 2 of the systemVersion) > 5.1 then
        put "Segoe UI,plain,12,black" into tSysAttribs
      else
        put "Tahoma,plain,11,black" into tSysAttribs
      end if
      break
  end switch
  return item (itemOffset(pAttrib,tAttribs)) of tSysAttribs
end TextAttribs

Obviously this doesn't handle a bunch of situations, isn't optimized, and is primarily meant to give you an idea how this can work. But LC is so fast that even with dozens of controls, the time to set the properties is not noticeable.

Hope this helps,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/