Am Samstag, den 12.04.2008, 10:11 -0400 schrieb Lee Jenkins: > Hi everyone, > > I am curious as to what others do in the case of applications that must be > portable between Windows and Linux regarding fonts. > > The specific font that is actually used doesn't matter to me as long as its > readable and well rendered. > > Just looking for suggestions, > > Thank you, >
Hi, I had this problem recently while developing a Java applet. I used many advanced Unicode characters (mainly math symbols) in it and later, some users (mainly Windows users and some not up-to-date Linux users) reported that a lot of symbols where not shown correctly. Also, the width of my applet was a fixed constant and on some machines the font was much wider than on others and the Labels didn't fit anymore on the form. I also used sometimes a mono-spaced font and sometimes a normal font. There were even more problems with the mono-spaced font which seems to support even less characters on some systems. I first tried around to give some special system dependent rules for an individual choice of the font. After a lot of tries, I came to the conclusion, that this is just not a good idea and there will always be some systems which have some problems. In my case, I was restricted in the choice of the font also because I need a lot of these advanced Unicode characters. If you just need the normal Latin characters and nothing more, it's probably easier. But you should design your application in a way that it will work however the size of the actual font is. For my problem, I just came to the conclusion to distribute a font together with the Java applet. The applet just loads this font and doesn't use any system font at all. Here, I had further problems to find a font which can display all of my needed characters. Normally, if you use the system fonts, there are special mechanisms that if a font doesn't support a individual character, the system will use automatically another similar font. I first figured this out while I was loading the ttf file directly. I am using the free font DejaVu now which supports all my wanted characters. Regards, Albert _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
