Fonts Question

Hello Every one.

I just had an interesting experience with the user in Russia - they use
Cyrillic there along with the Latin characters.

Some of his interfaces, where we use the #system style on the widgets,  
were shown OK, but others where the style was set to #default - were
shown as black boxes.

What I found that for some reason he had  the font named "Helvetica'
installed on his Windows XP computer, and that font did not have the
Cyrillic characters support in it( nor any other Unicode characters ) .

After I manually removed the offending font,  all of the interfaces do
look as they should.

After looking around VW a bit, I found the possible culprit:
the class method:

   VariableSizeTextAttributes>> #initializeDefault

which uses the following query for finding appropriate fonts:

standardVariableWidthFont

     ^FontDescription new
             family: #('helv' 'helvetica' 'arial' 'nimbus sans*'
'*sans*' '*');
             manufacturer: #('adobe' '*');
             fixedWidth: false;
             serif: false;
             italic: false;
             boldness: 0.5;
             pixelSize: 12


I wonder if I do deploy on Windows can I safely remove fonts which are
rarely found on Windows like: 'helv' 'helvetica' and potentially add
something like 'tahoma' and 'times*' to the search list?

Has anybody done that and what would be potential implications ?

Regards,
--
Mark Pirogovsky

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[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

Hi Mark,

We ran into the same problem years ago. After installing some printer drivers, the Helvetica font got installed as a side effect and all of a sudden the font in VW changed to Helvetica which was not what we wanted. After removing the font all was fine again.

This problem only occurred in our development environment, because in the application that our customers use we have our own TextAttributes definitions. We don't rely on the "Default", "Large" or "Small" fonts from VW. We just have our own and we use "MS Sans Serif" as the default font (although users can choose which font they want).

The definition looks like this:

(FontDescription new
        family: (Array with: self fontName with: '*');
        manufacturer: #('*');
        italic: false;
        boldness: 0.5;
        pixelSize: self fontSize).

Where #fontName is 'MS Sans Serif' by default. Some of our customers require Chinese or other unicode characters, in that case they usually choose "Arial" as the default font, but this of course depends on what fonts you have installed that cover the characters you need.

We have never had any problems with this.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Mark Pirogovsky
Sent: donderdag 3 mei 2012 23:12
To: vwnc
Subject: [vwnc] Fonts Question

Hello Every one.

I just had an interesting experience with the user in Russia - they use Cyrillic there along with the Latin characters.

Some of his interfaces, where we use the #system style on the widgets, were shown OK, but others where the style was set to #default - were shown as black boxes.

What I found that for some reason he had  the font named "Helvetica'
installed on his Windows XP computer, and that font did not have the Cyrillic characters support in it( nor any other Unicode characters ) .

After I manually removed the offending font,  all of the interfaces do look as they should.

After looking around VW a bit, I found the possible culprit:
the class method:

   VariableSizeTextAttributes>> #initializeDefault

which uses the following query for finding appropriate fonts:

standardVariableWidthFont

     ^FontDescription new
             family: #('helv' 'helvetica' 'arial' 'nimbus sans*'
'*sans*' '*');
             manufacturer: #('adobe' '*');
             fixedWidth: false;
             serif: false;
             italic: false;
             boldness: 0.5;
             pixelSize: 12


I wonder if I do deploy on Windows can I safely remove fonts which are rarely found on Windows like: 'helv' 'helvetica' and potentially add something like 'tahoma' and 'times*' to the search list?

Has anybody done that and what would be potential implications ?

Regards,
--
Mark Pirogovsky

_______________________________________________
vwnc mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

_______________________________________________
vwnc mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc