[Lazarus] Fonts Advise between Windows & Linux

[Lee Jenkins]

Albert Zeyer wrote:
> 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
> 

Thanks Albert.

This will be primarily simple texts such as button captions, etc.  I just want 
to make sure that the fonts display as normally as possible on each platform.

Thanks again,

-- 

Warm Regards,

Lee

"When my company started out, we were really, really, really, really small. 
Now...we're just really small."