Standardize Font Appearance

[Richard Gaskin]

This discussion has been very interesting to me.

The team worked hard in v9 to deliver font management in a way that 
makes it easier than ever to deliver apps that meet user expectations 
and OS design specs on the platforms deployed to.  Mac looks like Mac, 
Win looks like Win, all with one font setting.  I used to have to work 
really hard with all sorts of workarounds to get that platform-savvy 
look, and now with the team's efforts with v9 it's a snap.

Of course we all use the web, and I used to subscribe to CD-ROM 
publications that deliver textual content for multiple platforms.  So I 
see the value in getting heading and body content in text-focused 
content-driven apps to look reasonably on-brand across platforms. But in 
all my native and web dev reading over the decades I don't think I've 
seen this much effort expended toward attempting to get near-perfect 
parity for text appearance across platforms (except for prepress, but 
that's another era).

But I know you folks. You wouldn't put in this kind of effort if it 
wasn't useful.

So help me understand: what are you working on where a user expects 
fine-grained font rendering consistency on multiple OSes? What do these 
apps do?

Do your users switch OSes during a session, or work on Windows by day 
and Mac at night?  How many also use Linux in that multi-OS workflow?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com