[PD] Cross-platform uniform GUI rendering of patches.

[Dan Wilcox]

> On Feb 22, 2017, at 1:41 AM, pd-list-request at lists.iem.at wrote:
> 
> The primary goal is to make Pd(-vanilla)'s appearance consistent across
> platforms. Part of that is that box sizes don't change when switching
> platforms. As a side effect of this fix, patches also don't change
> appearance when switching between Pd flavors (Do we still need to care
> about Pd-extended, since it's been phased out?).
> 
> From what I gathered from the "Pd Metrics on Xubuntu 16 04 02 LTS"
> thread, the following steps are required to achieve that goal:
> 
>   * Adjustments of the font metrics. It seems we can just take the ones
>     from Pd-extended.
> 
>   * Use the same font on all platforms. Pd apparently looks for "DejaVu
>     Sans Mono" first, so that is the one we should make available
>     everywhere.

I’d suggest joining in the “dejavu” branch on Github: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/42 <https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/42>

> On Linux, it's the task of Pd's package maintainers that DejaVu is
> installed when Pd is to be installed. If I'm not mistaken, DejaVu is
> installed per default on all Debian derivatives, so we do not have to
> care about them.

Yup

> On Windows, the font is missing and the Pd installer
> could be adapted to install the font along with Pd.

That would be the easiest solution. A more complicated but perhaps better solution is to load the font locally when running the GUI.

> On macOS, I don’t know what the required steps would be.

I’ve already provided them in the branch. This is working for Mac.

> I propose that before we submit any fixes to Miller we are absolutely
> certain that the adapted font metrics are correct in that the resulting
> box sizes are consistent for all available font sizes (8, 10, 12, 16,
> 24, 36). And when testing this, we make sure that Pd uses "DejaVu Sans
> Mono". Only then we submit any fix.

Yes. Testing has already been happening see: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/wiki/Crossplatform-font-metrics-%26-comparisons <https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/wiki/Crossplatform-font-metrics-&-comparisons>

> If we find good font metrics, I'll submit a fix to the NSIS installer
> script, so that installing DejaVu is part of the Pd installation
> process on Windows. Yet, I'm not sure whether it is enough to simply
> drop the font files into %windir%\Fonts or whether the font needs to be
> registered somewhere. 

Note, I’ve added DejaVu Sans Mono to a “font” folder in the dejavu branch.

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika <http://twitter.com/danomatika>
danomatika.com <http://danomatika.com/>
robotcowboy.com <http://robotcowboy.com/>



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