resized fonts when moving patch from PC to Mac

    Zachary Seldess
    Jan 25 2006 | 5:00 pm
    Hi everyone,
    This issue has likely been discussed in the forum before, and I apologize in advance for the repetition. I can't seem to find the answer though:
    I have some rather large patches, created on PC, using a number of different Arial font sizes. When I open them on Mac, the arial text is all larger than on PC, causing objects to overlap with other objects and text within objects to wrap. It will take forever to manually correct this everytime I use a Mac.
    Is there a font that doesn't change size across platform? And if not, is there anything else I can do to avoid this headache?
    Thanks for the help,
    Zachary
    • Adam Kendall
      Jan 25 2006 | 5:46 pm
      Try a common, monospace font like courier in a standard size (like 10 or 12).
      Maybe somebody has a better answer.
    • Peter Castine
      Jan 25 2006 | 6:10 pm
      How to avoid headaches? Take two aspirin. Some people find washing them down with vodka helps.-
      Seriously: there have been a number of changes made to the way Max handles font information in recent years, all (apparently) made with the goal of improving cross-platform font compatibility. How well the changes work depends on whom you ask.
      One thing you should check: save to text format and see whether your Arial is not being changed to the platform-neutral "Sans Serif" behind your back. Sans Serif is read as Geneva on Mac OS (at least with the std. init/max-fontmappings.txt file). There is no way in hell your text layout with Arial is going to match text layout in Geneva, never mind that fonts don't look much like each other. Their only commonality is being standard/default font on the respective platforms. You may find that a popular TrueType font (say, Futura) will be less subject to changes when moving patches from Windows to Mac. Or, you might be able to edit your fontmappings file to force Arial to remain Arial, even in Macland. But Arial is such an ugly font, isn't it?
      Of course, changing font for lots of patches is also going to be a headache. Good luck, and go easy with the vodka.
      -- Peter
      -------------- http://www.bek.no/~pcastine/Litter/ -------------- Peter Castine | ^ | Litter Power & Litter Bundle for Jitter pcastine@gmx.net | pcastine@bek.no | iCE: Sequencing, Recording, and Interface Building 4-15@kagi.com | for Max/MSP | Extremely cool | http://www.dspaudio.com | http://www.dspaudio.com/software/software.html
    • f.e
      Jan 26 2006 | 8:50 am
    • Zachary Seldess
      Jan 27 2006 | 6:08 am
      Good Advice. Thanks Peter. In the end, I think using a system font that has a cross-platform equivalent (Arial->Arial, Courier New->Courier, etc.) and altering the fontmapping file accordingly is the easiest method. The fontmapping files on all the computers I've looked at (mac & win) convert Arial to Sans Serif when saving for windows, and Sans Serif to Geneva when opening in mac. Geneva and Arial do not have the same character width, hence the problems.
      Two questions:
      1) Does anyone have an idea why Cycling 74 decided to convert Arial to Sans Serif when saving on PC? Why not just keep it as Arial?(I think Arial is a system font for mac too - or does it only come with Microsoft Word on mac)
      2) And then why change Sans Serif to Geneva on mac and not to Arial? Or if there's no Arial, why not convert it to Helvetica? It has the same charater width.
      Arial is the default font for Max on PC I believe, as is Geneva for Max on Mac. So the idea might be to convert the default from one platform to the default from another. But why not make the default font on PC equivalent in size to the Mac version?
      Zachary