[PD] Vote your font! [was: fonts on GNU/Linux]

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On May 19, 2007, at 3:43 PM, Josh Steiner wrote:

> hy not make a vote? Attached are two screenshots, one with Vera
>>>> bold,
>>>> one with Vera normal, both on Linux, both on pd-extended 0.40.
>>>>
>>>> Which do you prefer?
>>>>
>>>>  [ ] normal.png
>>>>  [ ] bold.png
>>>>
>
> 1) i vote normal, the bold looks way too heavy to me.  reading the  
> comment text in bold makes my eyes spaz.
>
>> Yeah, things look bad in those screenshots.  I am not sure of  
>> Frank's  setup. I'll do more testing on GNU/Linux.  Also, those  
>> PNGs are an  odd format (16bit?) so they were behaving strangely  
>> on my computer.   I converted them to gifs and they look better.   
>> Also, I have added  some screenshots from Mac OS X, where the  
>> fonts are anti-aliased:
>>
>> http://pow.idmi.poly.edu/~hans/pdfonts/
>>
>
> *File not found!*
>
> The URL you have loaded has not been found on this server.
>
> Please alert the system administrator if you believe you have  
> reached this in error.
>
>
>> Since there is obviously some demand for bold fonts, I added a  
>> new  flag that allows you to set the font weight from the command  
>> line or  pd-settings file.  The flag is "-weight" and it expects  
>> either "bold"  or "normal".  Also, for those who don't like  
>> Bitstream Vera Sans  Mono, there is the "-typeface" flag.  Should  
>> be in tomorrows auto- builds.
>>
>
> won't this make the patches render at different sizes depending on  
> your choice of font?  so now if i want to open frank's GOP patchs  
> and have them render right i have to remember to turn on the bold  
> flag, which then makes all my patches render wrong?

Well, ideally the font info would be embedded in the patch, like in  
Max/MSP.  For this release, the box sizes are pegged to pixel sizes,  
so no matter what font you use, the boxes will be the same size.   
Also, the area that is the clickable area of the font will be the same.

This means that fonts that are quite a bit different than bitstream  
vera sans mono will look really bad.  If they are bigger, the text  
will run out of the boxes.  If they are smaller, then there will be a  
lot of blank space in the boxes.

So it's not great, but it's a step in the right direction.

.hc

>
> -josh
>
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