Text Formatting Workarounds?

[Scott Rossi]

Hey List Folks:

I poked through the mail archives a bit and found a few responses but I'm
still curious: what do folks do to make text display similarly across
platforms?

In the past, I always thought it was a simple matter to set the font specs
of the card or stack and have fields inherit the settings, but it seems in
all my 3/3.5 stacks this doesn't work any more.  Rev seems to apply
formatting based on the platform on which the stack was saved, and then
promptly loses the specs when the stack is opened on another platform (the
font/size properties read correctly, but the text doesn't display correctly,
often shrinking down to some weird size/font).

Setting font specs of a field by script doesn't seem to do anything and in
some cases compounds the problem since, for example, attempting to change
the font or size of text will only change the textheight of field,
positioning the text improperly in the field.

Because of the above, I wound up having to format the actual text inside the
fields, as opposed to formatting the fields themselves.  And the formatting
doesn't stick unless there's text in the field so what does one do here?  I
wound up putting space characters in empty fields to hold the formatting,
which is a pretty lousy solution.

This is ridiculous: it shouldn't be this difficult to format text from
platform to platform.  What's the secret?

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design