On Jul 26, 2005, at 6:43 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
PROBLEM 1: On WinXP, the cursor disappears whenever I mouse onto
a stack.
....
If you could add your comments to the bug report, the team might be
able to track it down. I don't think it depends on the stack
itself, since those people who report the problem say they have it
no matter what stack is opened. But maybe you can work with the RR
guys to determine if there is a system setting or something that is
responsible.
OK, I added a confirming comment, with a tiny bit more detail.
PROBLEM 2: in "answer" commands, the choices I specify are there,
but they're in reversed order.
As others have mentioned, the HIG for each OS is different. So I
don't think it is really a bug, since it is correct that the last
button you list (the default button) should be on the left on a
Windows box. If you do decide to write platform-specific code, be
ready for one side or the other to notice. Windows users think the
Mac order is backwards.
I see the point. OK, the platform-checking code isn't especially
onerous -- if I had a lot of "answer" dialogs I suppose I could write
a wrapper command. (Someday would it be nice to have pre-built cross-
platform wrappers for the basic Transcript commands?)
PROBLEM 3: One interactive tutorial works like this: In Courier
(for the sake of monospaced alignment between lines) there's a
line of text, with a line of marks over it. The marks, in
various combinations at various times, are covered up by opaque,
borderless fields, which are hidden (revealing the mark below) in
response to mouse-clicks. But on WinXP, though the font is the
same (Courier New), the size is different! So the mark-hiding
fields don't cover their marks.
Right, you are up against one of the most common cross platform
issues. Fonts of the same name and size are not identical on
different operating systems. One way to manage this is to find
(usually by trial and error) a size on one machine that matches a
different size on another. (Dar has done some experiments with this.)
Do you know if those results are available anywhere? A table of
comparative text-widths would be very handy, at least for me.
Mac fonts are often wider, so for example, if your Mac is using
Courier 12, you might find a match on Windows by using Courier 10
or 11. You might have to juggle textheights the same way. Once you
get the right sizes, you can run a quick preopencard handler that
sets each field's textsize and/or textheight to whatever it needs.
I'm already doing a preOpenStack in the main stack to set the two
fonts (one proportional, one monospace) according to what's available
on the runtime system. If I knew the right sizes it sounds as though
I could make the text fit the fields, backwards as that sounds. Time
for a lot of rolling the chair from one machine to the other, I guess.
One other thing you could do, if there is enough room, is just make
your cover fields large enough for the worst-case font size.
In many cases that would presumably work. Here, though, I have a lot
of finicky little fields. An example (I hope this comes out in
Courier after transmission):
/ x |x / | x (/)| x / | x /
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
x /|x(/)| / x | x / | x /
With misery, or that she would of late . . .
The marks get revealed -- the fields hiding them get hidden -- in
stages (one stage per card): first the / and x marks over
polysyllabic words, then the / marks over stressed monosyllables,
then the rest of the x and / marks, and finally the | marks. Within
each of these stage, order is determined by user. So I think I have
to work with shrinking the text instead.
Many thanks for your careful & thoughtful advice.
Charles
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