Cross Platform Font Layout - current workarounds

Peter Bogdanoff bogdanoff at me.com
Wed Aug 26 00:31:55 EDT 2020


I’ll chime in on this issue — for the benefit of others who may be wondering what is going on in this list.

All existing bugs in LiveCode going back to the distant past could possibly be fixed, and display discrepancies resolved, if LiveCode the company dramatically increased its revenue from getting a gazzilion more users, tuppling license fees, and maybe dramatically cutting expenses by firing all its employees to hire programmers in India. Until that happens, we use LiveCode’s flexibility to come up with solutions to problems. This is done all the time.

And LC advertises one code base. Technically this is true. “If the platform is Mac then do this, if it is Windows then do that.” That works for me as one code base for Mac and Windows without creating different code versions.

I have a text-heavy application where font appearance is critical for both English and Chinese characters. Just now I added a routine to change in Windows Chinese:

1.  modify the HTMLtext of a field to replace instances of Songti SC Regular (Mac) with SimSun (Windows)
2. remove paragraph indentions of 8 space characters of Songti SC Regular text and instead set the firstIndent of the line to 34
3. set the spaceBelow of each line to match the Mac line spacing

all on the fly as the text loads from an array for each page turn. It’s fast and the Chinese translator in China says that it now looks beautiful, when before it looked like garbage.

I could curse the darkness, or just program a light bulb and move on.

Peter Bogdanoff


> On Aug 25, 2020, at 8:53 PM, JB via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Chill, dude?
> ok, one of the cool things about LiveCode is instead of writing
> your program in Swift, Jave, or C, etc. is that you can easily
> include any of these languages in a LiveCode app.  I don’t
> know of another programming tool that allows you to do that
> and do it on various os’s.  Xcode allows you to mix objective-c
> with Swift by bridging it but LiveCode does it better.
> 
> We can only work with what we have available, things are
> changing fast and sometimes it is difficult to keep up no
> matter how hard you work on it.
> 
> JB
> 
> 
>> On Aug 25, 2020, at 8:39 PM, Stephen Barncard via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Sean Cole
>> 
>> Still no apologies.
>> Hey, you are starting to disrespect my friends and I’m not digging it. They
>> have done nothing other than bend over backwards to try to help and your
>> bad attitude and rudeness is crossing the line.
>> 
>> Remember the main rule here, no politics, religion or cheese and you,
>> buddy, have gone full limburger.
>> 
>> Chill, dude.
>> 
>>> On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 17:51 Bob Sneidar via use-livecode <
>>> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Reminds me of HTML. All platform consistency in display… until Microsoft
>>> and Netscape decided to do it “better”. It begs the question, is it better
>>> to be consistent with everyone else’s standards, or better to be… well…
>>> better?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Bob S
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Aug 25, 2020, at 5:40 PM, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
>>> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com<mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Yes, we all remember the TrueType rollout, and the promise of a
>>> single-file, cross-platform font definition.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> But for that format to provide pixel-perfect matched rendering requires
>>> all renderer implementers to use the same code.  And as you know, they
>>> don't.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> 
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>>> 
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>>> 
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>>> 
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>>> 
>>> --
>> --
>> Stephen Barncard - Sebastopol Ca. USA -
>> mixstream.org
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> 
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