Cfross-platform font comparison

[Neville Smythe]

As I am about to go on vacation this project delving into the Dark Arts may be on hold for a while, but a quick update of a former assertion is in order.

I claimed that strings on the Mac and Windows now have the same rendered lengths for a given font and size. Turns out this is only 85% accurate. Of the 4000 fonts so far examined, 566 show some differences on the two platforms. Most of these fonts are obscure, some have differences in only one size of the 10 sizes I test, and in the vast majority the differences are quite small – 96% of all fonts tested have the same length or have a difference of less than 10%. The standout exception is NewYork.ttf, which showed a difference of up to 15% in string length. (Why? As intimated, font technology is a Dark Art,and I may be risking insanity.)

I have yet to include the system fonts that come with Windows not also on the Mac, so there may be some more common fonts to add to the exceptions list. Note that Symbol.ttf on Windows is quite a different font from the Mac font of the same name.

Neville Smythe