[Lazarus] Fonts Advise between Windows & Linux

[Albert Zeyer]

Am Samstag, den 12.04.2008, 10:11 -0400 schrieb Lee Jenkins:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am curious as to what others do in the case of applications that must be 
> portable between Windows and Linux regarding fonts.
> 
> The specific font that is actually used doesn't matter to me as long as its 
> readable and well rendered.
> 
> Just looking for suggestions,
> 
> Thank you,
> 

Hi,

I had this problem recently while developing a Java applet. I used many
advanced Unicode characters (mainly math symbols) in it and later, some
users (mainly Windows users and some not up-to-date Linux users)
reported that a lot of symbols where not shown correctly. Also, the
width of my applet was a fixed constant and on some machines the font
was much wider than on others and the Labels didn't fit anymore on the
form. I also used sometimes a mono-spaced font and sometimes a normal
font. There were even more problems with the mono-spaced font which
seems to support even less characters on some systems.

I first tried around to give some special system dependent rules for an
individual choice of the font. After a lot of tries, I came to the
conclusion, that this is just not a good idea and there will always be
some systems which have some problems.

In my case, I was restricted in the choice of the font also because I
need a lot of these advanced Unicode characters. If you just need the
normal Latin characters and nothing more, it's probably easier. But you
should design your application in a way that it will work however the
size of the actual font is.

For my problem, I just came to the conclusion to distribute a font
together with the Java applet. The applet just loads this font and
doesn't use any system font at all.

Here, I had further problems to find a font which can display all of my
needed characters. Normally, if you use the system fonts, there are
special mechanisms that if a font doesn't support a individual
character, the system will use automatically another similar font. I
first figured this out while I was loading the ttf file directly.

I am using the free font DejaVu now which supports all my wanted
characters.

Regards,
Albert