the fontSizes

[Scott Rossi]

It's less of an issue with hi res screens of today but bitmap fonts allow pixel perfect display of text.  But the fonts are designed to be used only at specific point sizes.

Antialiasing routines can make any font appear soft and/or fuzzy, and that's actually a key aspect of using bitmap fonts -- being able to disable antialiasing.  So I'm not sure how one could really take advantage of bitmap fonts in LiveCode since AFAIK, you can't disable font antialiasing. Folks using Photoshop are spoiled because that application offers 4 or 5 antialiasing options, to get text looking just right.

Frankly, font rendering has never been very good in LiveGood.  I've had several clients over the years (myself included) who replaced important text with images because they couldn't deal with LCs less than stellar font rendering.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media UX/UI Design


> On May 23, 2015, at 1:04 PM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 23/05/15 22:55, Paul Dupuis wrote:
>>> On 5/23/2015 2:43 PM, Richmond wrote:
>>>> On 23/05/15 18:32, Bob Cole wrote:
>>>> put the fontSizes of "Arial" into message box
>>> Over here in the "Happy World of Linux" (Xubuntu 15.04):
>>> 
>>> 1. "put the fontSizes of "Arial" into message box"
>>> 
>>> results in nothing at all, whether 6.7.5 or 7.0.5, probably because
>>> there is no "Arial" font on my machine.
>>> 
>>> 2. "put the fontSizes of "Caladea" into message box" [ a font which
>>> Libre Office 'sees' on my system. ]
>>> 
>>> results in nothing at all either.
>>> 
>>> 3. "put the fontSizes of "UnDotum" into message box" [ a font which
>>> shows up when I do a 'put the fontNames' exercise ]
>>> 
>>> results in a "0" in both 6.7.5 and 7.0.5
>>> 
>>> Sorry, not much help.
>>> 
>>> Even tho' the documentation sez 'fontSizes' is good for Linux as well
>>> as Macintosh.
>> An empty result is the expected result for any font name passed to the
>> function that is not among the list of fonts returned by "the fontNames"
>> 0 is the expected result for any scalable font (among the list of fonts
>> provided by "the fontNames") since such fonts can be scaled to any size.
>> The fontSizes function is ONLY relevant for old fashion bitmapped fonts,
>> and while they are still out there and people still use them, 99% of all
>> fonts these days are scalable (Truetype, Postscript, etc.)
>> 
>> I would say this function is a left over from support of Classic MacOS
>> days and should be considered deprecated, but someone on the list will
>> undoubtedly respond that they have an app in current use that still uses
>> bitmapped fonts.
> I really don't understand that as I was designing scalable fonts in 1994 with Fontographer
> for use on Mac OS 7.1.
> 
> I looked at bitmapped fonts and wondered why one would still bother with them (20 years ago!)
> when, already, so many truetype fonts were readily available.
> 
> Richmond.
> 
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