[PD] cyclone comment and cross platform (was Re: Purr Data rc1)

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Why not just use the built-in <ctrl-5> comment?


      From: Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com>
 To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com> 
Cc: Pd-List <pd-list at lists.iem.at>
 Sent: Friday, December 2, 2016 1:10 PM
 Subject: Re: [PD] cyclone comment and cross platform (was Re: Purr Data rc1)
   
Hi, I see Purr Data has this feature where it accepts spaces in lables such as in canvases... this is awesome, and mostly why I use cyclone/comment
I can see we could depart from how you can lable stuff in Purr Data to make a new working cross platform version of cyclone/comment that is still backwards compatible.
cheers 
2016-11-29 2:28 GMT-02:00 Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com>:

one question, how does canvas and other fonts for labels work in cross platforms?
why not use that for comment... for now, all cyclone/comment is can be thought of just being a fancy label perhaps...
I did use it a lot in my new help files that I'm working on, but only cause it'd be too much work to use canvas and labels, as it'd imply a canvas for each word as it doesn't take spaces (is only a symbol)
I was even thinking of ditching it when, it stopped working on vanilla 0.47 - yeah, that's another thing, a fix needs to be made to vanilla for old versions of comment (0.2 and below to work) - but then I realized it could be really useful. I was also hoping to add properties windows to make it more convenient.
anyway, the question is, why labels and stuff simply work?
cheers


2016-11-28 21:45 GMT-02:00 Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>:

 


Another reason for putting it off is that I still haven't figured out a sane approach 
to handling arbitrary fonts in a diagram where everything is absolutely positioned.  
In fact I only have a minimally-workable approach to handling a single, mono- 
spaced font across platforms.  For example, there was a change somewhere in 
the Gnu/Linux font-stack (relatively) recently that renders fonts (or at least 
DejaVu Sans Mono) noticeably wider than before.  So Windows, OSX, and 
old Gnu/Linux would render a particular line of text sized at "12px" within less 
than a single pixel of each other.  The new Gnu/Linux font stack (seen in Ubuntu 
16.04 and some recent Arch) rendered the same text about 7 pixels wider.
Worse, the newer Gnu/Linux font stack quantizes the "px" sizes such that the 
next smallest size is noticeably smaller.  So in Ubuntu 16.04 I have to compromise 
by keeping the object box the same size and having some extra padding at the 
end-- otherwise users of that OS could end up tightly spacing their object chains 
in ways that cause overlaps on the other platforms.
So... I'd like to get a handle on that mess first, then handling arbitrary font 
families-- as in cyclone/comment-- will hopefully be easier and less prone 
to bugs.

> well, it seems some of the issues are exactly what we're facing now...
I think those issues are impossible to solve for displaying arbitrary fonts in 
a diagram like a Pd patch, and especially for arbitrary fonts in multi-line text.  
The user simply won't be able to predict whether or not there will be collisions 
on someone else's platform (or even if those fonts aren't available, which fonts 
will get chosen).

I'm all for porting cyclone/comment for the sake of Max compatibility.  But I'd 
strongly advise against using cyclone/comment in any patch that's supposed to 
be used cross-platform (aside from its own help patch, of course).

-Jonathan

> cheers

   


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