Standardize Font Appearance

[Pi Digital]

I had a quick turnaround job for some guys in Ghana. It made it a complete nightmare as I had done the original build in Windows, their main platform, and they wanted a backup for Mac. As this was for a TV show where the text was dynamic but had to be identical on both it made it almost impossible. I had to write multiple conditionals to allow for the two platforms display differences of baselines and formatting. Now I recommend they only build for a single platform as it is ‘unreasonable’ to expect that two different systems will perform or display in the same way. 

Your disturbing highlight of the differences in MacOS appearance was not nice though. Well worth knowing but not great for us, eh?

Sean


> On 4 Sep 2022, at 10:34, Neville Smythe via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> So I have conducted a more careful test of the proposed method of standardising fonts across platforms, that is, installing some Google fonts in the standalone for use in labels and fields, with the objective of setting the rects of objects on the development platform and having the same appearance on all 3 platforms: no more missing pixels or wrapped words because of the differences in fonts between the platforms.
> 
> Unfortunately the method does quite not give the hoped-for solution. Even though the fonts supposedly have the same metrics, the appearance still differs between platforms. For both NotoSans and NotoSerif I find the baselines differ by one or two pixels between Mac Monterey and Windows (which I don’t really understand, since the ascent is built into the font, but nevertheless becomes different when rendered). The pixel lengths of the tested strings were the same however: allowing just a couple of extra pixels height should be sufficient in these cases. However on Linux (Ubuntu), while the baselines were the same, the length of rendered strings differed markedly, in one test case wrapping a trailing word out of sight. And a nasty surprise, the text length on Mac High Sierra was 8% longer than on Monterey!
> 
> So I’m afraid one must still write once, test everywhere. 
> 
> Neville
> 
> 
> 
> 
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