[PD] Font weirdness with 0.43test

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at at.or.at
Thu Aug 26 17:57:42 CEST 2010


Yes, I agree.  I think the font to standardize on is DevaVu Sans  
Mono.  Its a decent font, it fits already, its free software, and it  
has the best unicode support of probably any font.  It also comes  
installed by default on most GNU/Linux systems.  In Pd-extended, the  
Windows installer installs DejaVu Sans Mono.  On Mac OS X, shipping a  
font with the Pd.app is a massive pain, so Pd-extended uses Monaco,  
which is included in Mac OS X, and quite close in size to DejaVu Sans  
Mono.

I'd welcome a better solution, but I have spent literally days on  
dealing with fonts, mostly on GNU/Linux, and I can't see a better way,  
especially since wish 8.4 and 8.5 on GNU/Linux handle fonts so much  
differently from each other.  (For example, if you look at the output  
of fonttest.tcl using 8.4 and 8.5, you'll see that the same fonts have  
different metrics!).

.hc

On Aug 26, 2010, at 12:52 AM, Miller Puckette wrote:

> My machine is running 8.5... but I don't think it's good to have
> Pd's default font choice come out all wrong... ideally, it should do
> something reasonable no matter what the font (well, at least if it's
> fixed-pitch).  At the very least, Pd has to know the correct font
> metrics... and it seems now not to.
>
> Perhaps a solution for cross-platform patching (such as for making  
> help
> files) could be to say "this will look woerd on other machines unless
> you use font <blaz> to develope the patch so that you see the  
> canonical
> sizes.
>
> cheers
> M
>
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 04:18:49PM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner  
> wrote:
>>
>> Here is the answer to this font problem:
>>
>> - use Tcl/Tk 8.5 or newer, Tcl 8.4 is very flawed (see archives for
>> discussion, basically it makes bad guesses and assigns them to the
>> fontname "courier")
>>
>> - use one of these fonts: {"Courier 10 Pitch" "DejaVu Sans Mono" \
>>        "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" "Droid Sans Mono" "Andale Mono"
>>
>> Anything else and you'll have strange results.  In order to have  
>> better
>> font support, we need to do some major surgery.
>>
>> .hc
>>
>> On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 13:38 -0700, Miller Puckette wrote:
>>> Long as there's a way to fix a problem I'm having:  in message  
>>> boxes with
>>> many lines of text, you can easily click on one character and  
>>> select one above
>>> it... it gets very confusing.  (Fedora 13 out-of-box).
>>>
>>> I'm guessing that in the current version the GUI simply tells Pd  
>>> what size
>>> the font ought to have had instead of the genuine one.  Pd could  
>>> easily
>>> expand the box to the ought-to size (at least optionally for those  
>>> wishing
>>> to make cross-platform patches) but should know about the text's  
>>> actual size
>>> anyway.  To be continued...
>>>
>>> cheers
>>> Miller
>>>
>>> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 01:21:08AM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner  
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Aug 23, 2010, at 7:01 AM, Frank Barknecht wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 01:39:08PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>>>>>> BTW I've been using Pd-Extended's Linux/OSX default font size  
>>>>>> as the
>>>>>> basis for all my patches for making my last 400 patches or so.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've used Pd vanilla for all my patches so far, with a "10" font- 
>>>>> size,
>>>>> whatever that is in pixels. I know, that Pd-extended uses some
>>>>> different
>>>>> layout for several years now, which makes patches look wrong  
>>>>> when you
>>>>> load them in Pd vanilla and the other way around. I have not much
>>>>> interest to discuss the differences between vanilla and Pd-x, as  
>>>>> I am
>>>>> hoping the two to unify again with the gui-rewrite. So I'm  
>>>>> willing to
>>>>> change my preferences to whatever will be the new vanilla, but I'd
>>>>> prefer to not do again that with every release or with every new
>>>>> Courier-like font that pops up on the Internets' Top 10 console  
>>>>> font
>>>>> lists and is so much better than the previous ones.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Unless Miller changes it in the future, Pd 0.43 should have the  
>>>> same
>>>> boxes sizes that Pd-extended has had for a couple versions.  That
>>>> was one of my goals with the GUI rewrite.  Its a bug if that's not
>>>> the case.
>>>>
>>>> .hc
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> The arc of history bends towards justice.     - Dr. Martin Luther
>>>> King, Jr.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>



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