Hey all
I'm happy that so many people are trying to tackling the font / box
size issue in vanilla now. From what I can tell, box sizes aren't even consistent within the same Linux distribution. A program can essentially either resize fonts to fit hard-coded box sizes, or it can resize boxes to fit the fonts. Pd Vanilla does the latter.
When I switched fromUbuntu 14.04 to 16.04, boxes grew horizontally by one pixel per
character for patches with fontsize=10. When you switched to 16.04, you started using an updated font engine to render the fonts. As far as I can tell there is no set of rules or constraints on the font stack developers to keep font sizing algos consistent across time. I do know that Windows, OSX, and the old Gnu font stack sizing algo (i.e., 14.04) were within a pixel of each other when measuring the width of a 31-characterfor string of DejaVu Sans Mono at a particular pixel size. The newer Gnu font stack rendered a string that was seven pixels wider at the same pixel size.
The metrics can vary widely or not at all for a particular font.
-Jonathan