Philosophical questions about the fontNames

[Paul Dupuis]

On 3/12/2020 3:24 PM, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> With more substantial content (web authoring, printed materials, etc.) 
> the user cares very much, and the likelihood of ever wanting the 
> OS-specific default font is low, so assigning your own default font 
> explicitly would work well (even better for some apps, let the user 
> define a default).
>
> So while I do support your request to extend "effective" to apply here 
> (notwithstanding the considerable effort the team would need to do to 
> figure out what the values of the OS constants refer to), I also 
> recognize it's not a common use case.  Worth supporting, IMO, but of 
> low priority.

Now, after Mark's explanation, I get it. I'll definitely go back to 
explicitly specifying default fonts by platform. As you know, if you do 
that right, because of LiveCode's inheritance, you really only need to 
do it for a few objects on startup.

I really did go down a rabbit hole. I saw the new (something) font 
names, look at what I thought they were for and thought I could make 
code cleaner by using them. Now I know, that is not the case for my 
specific application. For other people or for some future App of mine 
they may be ideal.

And, I agree with you. Of all the bugs and enhancement Curry and I have 
submitted in the past 6 month, making 'effective' work in this case 
would be near the bottom of my priority list.


And yes, I expect we'll always be stuck with pain points in 
cross-platform UI work that NO development environment will ever make 
truly seamless because the OS vendors themselves try to differentiate 
their products by their appearance and the way the UI works (among many 
other factors).

I can still wish it wasn't so though...

I am working on a new tool requested by a customer. The crunching and 
analysis of the research data coding is simple compared to the UI which 
will probably take me 10 times as long to code and get to look and 
function "right" on macOS and Windows.