safest fonts

On 11-Jan-2007, at 5:16, Benjamin Thigpen wrote:
> Thanks to those who have responded to my question. Summing up so far:
[schnipp]
> 1. Genva seems to be good for Mac-to-Mac compatibility (over
> various generations and OSs, as I rcall). But not for Mac-PC
> compatibility.

FTR, Geneva's font metrics changed a little around the time OS X was
introduced. There are very, very few people using Classic Mac OSs
nowadays, and even fewer are moving patches from there to here, so
not a big issue. But if you are concerned about long-range backwards
compatibility, even Geneva isn't safe:-(

Also, I'm not sure if screen anti-aliasing affects Geneva's font
metrics. I suspected this was part of the problem with screen layout
when Max 4.2 (Carbon) was introduced.

> However, the Max help patches are in Geneva, and I presume they
> look fine on PC. Perhaps the objects have been resized so there are
> no wrapping problems?

Picky picky: The help patches are in generic Sans Serif, which is
mapped to Geneva on Mac and Ariel on Windows when the patcher file is
read into memory.

It looks to me like most help patches are built with enough air
between comment boxes for it not to matter much if a comment box is
rendered w/one line more or fewer. But there may have been some
manual resizing of the boxes to keep things looking good on both
platforms.

> 2. Verdana may be good for Mac-PC compatibility.
>
> What does happen in this case? And if you build a patch on Mac
> using Verdana, does the text appear the same when you open it on
> PC? (I don't have a PC to test on.)

Verdana isn't touched by max-fontmappings.txt and it should render
identically on Mac and Windows. Assuming the user hasn't trashed it
on either platform (another eventuality the patch designer might want
to take into account!-}

>> Or maybe, for the sake of compatibility, next mac version could
>> abandon the historic max font and switch to a common one, like
>> Arial, for example...
>
> 3. Arial is a common font.
>
> Which means it is likely to appear in various generations and
> across platforms, I presume. Is it likely to have the same size on
> various machines, and so not have line-wrap and/or other problems?
> And so is it perhaps a "safe" font?

Arial, like Verdana, is a TrueType font and should, hence, render
identically across platforms. However, part of Max 4.3/4.5's cross-
platform strategy was defined by these lines from max-fontmappings.txt:

max system windows genericfontmap "Sans Serif" Arial;
max system windows genericsavefontmap Arial "Sans Serif";
max system macintosh genericfontmap "Sans Serif" Geneva;
max system macintosh genericsavefontmap Geneva "Sans Serif";

This mapping back and forth between Arial and Geneva for Windows/Mac
could perhaps be dropped in the future (although it would annoy
anyone who relies on it to get decent cross-platform rendering).

> Can anyone confirm if and to what extent these fonts are safe? Are
> there other common fonts that don't (or are unlikely to) cause
> problems?

All I can say is that TrueType is TrueType. Any TrueType font should
render identically on any platform.

Also, any PostScript font will render identically on all platforms
that use Screen PostScript or Acrobat as the drawing model. Mac OS
X's Quartz does that, I don't know about Windows. However, AFAICT,
Max currently uses QuickDraw for all drawing, and I have no idea if
this is likely to change as soon as 5.0.

> I just want to be able to build my patches from the beginning so
> that they won't look like dirt when opened on another machine.

Even using a TrueType fonts is no guarantee for success. Users have
the option of trashing almost any font from their system. If a font
isn't available, the OS substitutes font and then all bets about
layout are off.

However, there is a 100.000% guaranteed cross-platform solution.

I feel like Deep Thought now. There is a solution, but you're not
going to like it.

You're really not going to like it.

Get the text the way you want it, select & cut, Paste as Picture...

I said you weren't going to like it.-|

I've done this for a few limited things that I hope will never change.

Otherwise, stick to the standard system fonts, leave lots of space
between comment boxes, if you want specific line breaks use "2 byte
compatibility". And check formatting on both platforms.

Hope this helps,
Peter

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