> 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 from
Ubuntu 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