fonts: what is a "point" in Linux/Gnome?

[Richmond Mathewson]

On 01/03/2010 20:15, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> "What accounts for this tendency toward uncommonly large control sizes?"
>
> What tendency???
>
> There isn't any such tendency, as far as I can see.  None.  Maybe its
> something to do with Ubuntu and how they configure things out of the box?
> Dunno.  But it is not a factor in any distro I've used.
>
>    
"uncommonly large control sizes"

Humpf.

Set at a screen-res of 1280 x 1024 on a 17" monitor my Ubuntu 10.4 Alpha 3
(also known as "Richmond's Impatience") screen font sizes LOOK (which is
fairly subjective) pretty much the same as my Mac OS 10.5.8 at
1280 x 1024 on a 17" monitor.

The inescapable facts are:

1. Linux "does" fonts in a different way to Mac and Win.

2. RunRev on Linux "doesn't" very well when it comes to fonts.

Having said that I should say that, for my standalones I deploy in
my school (which have to be converted into standalones using
RunRev 2.2.1 because Ubuntu 5.10 is unable to cope with standalones
made with RunRev 4 and because my tatty-old PCs cannot cope
with newer versions of Ubuntu - not that that matters really for
my purposes) I always do the build on one of the target machines
(although I normally design the stack on a Mac or a more advanced
Linux machine) after going through the stacks and setting all fields
and buttons to work properly with the fonts RunRev 2.2.1 sees on
them.

My honest opinion is that for what we might like to term "coloured
Hypercard" teaching stacks RunRev on Linux really doesn't have any
major problems with stacks.

The "fun" starts when one wants to leverage stacks from outwith the
system.