Cross Platform Font Layout - current workarounds

[Richard Gaskin]

Sean Cole wrote:

 > What is the current 'workaround' everyone is using when creating a
 > cross-platform app to make sure that all text appears the same
 > regardless of platform? Particularly between Windows and Mac for
 > me at the moment.

Font metrics will differ between OSes because the underlying rendering 
method used by each OS is different.

Have you delivered cross-platform apps in which you found no difference 
at all?

The closest I can imagine might be PDF, achievable with some settings 
only by decomposing the font into the Postscript describing the page.

Even browsers, with their multi-million-dollar code bases and their 
mind-bending efforts to make things as uniform as practical across 
platforms, will evidence the difference in OS rendering subsystems.

If you've found anything that corrects for this, I would enjoy learning 
about it. I can't even imagine how such a thing would work, so I'd learn 
a lot.


 > Also, side note, does anyone remember why we STILL have a discrepancy
 > between fontnames() in Mac and Windows? Not only do the windows fonts
 > show alphabetically and mac dramatically out of order, but also, the
 > names themselves are screwed up...

My understanding is that it's the same as when getting a list of files 
in a directory, the names are returned in the order given to LC by the 
host OS.

The sort command can be used where sorting is needed.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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