Standardize Font Appearance

Bob Sneidar bobsneidar at iotecdigital.com
Tue Sep 13 11:11:37 EDT 2022


For me it's simple. I want the same baseline and alignment on two platforms I work with, MacOS and Windows, when using an embedded font. My particular issue is I think a bug and I am reminded to send Panos a sample stack demonstrating the issue. EXACT PRECICE EQUIVALENCE of font appearance is not my goal, and I don't think can ever be accomplished, due to the reasons cited before. I just want a label that has the width and height auto fitted on a Mac to not be cut off on Windows.

Perhaps what would be useful is if there was an Autofit property for fields that would adjust the width and height of a field, instead of having to manually do it. Otherwise I can do it programmatically.

Bob S


On Sep 12, 2022, at 19:51 , Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com<mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:

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



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