Something seems hideous about this. Is there some good reason for this or was this planned from the start to torture me?
It's tempting to say it was designed just to torment you, but actually this has been the bane of desktop publishing and software design since day one. Apple first came out with TrueType fonts, later followed by Microsoft's version of scalable font metrics. Microsoft did it diferently, of course, and sharing desktop publishing documents across platforms became a nightmare. To make matters worse, Windows also uses a *third* set of metrics for its printer fonts. That means that even if you get something to look right on screen, it will print entirely differently on a PC (Macs thankfully remain consistent, since the same metrics are used on screen and for printing.) Windows definitely does not have WYSIWYG printing support by any means, and I still haven't figured out how commercial Windows software is able to fake it. The problem has bitten me more than once, and is the reason that Rev provides the "formatForPrinting" property to help stack authors get some idea of how the printout will vary from the screen display.
As others have suggested, the difficulty of assuring consistency of font display across platforms is rarely worth the trouble and isn't really reliable anyway. Most of us just get the best approximation we can, and let the text fall as it may. In general, if you lay out fields on Windows, there will be plenty of room for the same text on a Mac. If you lay out fields on a Mac, leave a lot of extra space for the Windows display. Sometimes you can adjust the field margins depending on the platform to give the extra pixels you need to create consistent word wrap, but don't count on it always being accurate. If a user doesn't have the fonts your stack expects, there's no telling how it will look and very little you can do about it.
-- Jacqueline Landman Gay | [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
_______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
