Another reason for putting it off is that I still haven't figured out a sane approach to handling arbitrary fonts in a diagram where everything is absolutely positioned. In fact I only have a minimally-workable approach to handling a single, mono- spaced font across platforms. For example, there was a change somewhere in the Gnu/Linux font-stack (relatively) recently that renders fonts (or at least DejaVu Sans Mono) noticeably wider than before. So Windows, OSX, and old Gnu/Linux would render a particular line of text sized at "12px" within less than a single pixel of each other. The new Gnu/Linux font stack (seen in Ubuntu 16.04 and some recent Arch) rendered the same text about 7 pixels wider. Worse, the newer Gnu/Linux font stack quantizes the "px" sizes such that the next smallest size is noticeably smaller. So in Ubuntu 16.04 I have to compromise by keeping the object box the same size and having some extra padding at the end-- otherwise users of that OS could end up tightly spacing their object chains in ways that cause overlaps on the other platforms. So... I'd like to get a handle on that mess first, then handling arbitrary font families-- as in cyclone/comment-- will hopefully be easier and less prone to bugs.
well, it seems some of the issues are exactly what we're facing now...
I think those issues are impossible to solve for displaying arbitrary fonts in a diagram like a Pd patch, and especially for arbitrary fonts in multi-line text. The user simply won't be able to predict whether or not there will be collisions on someone else's platform (or even if those fonts aren't available, which fonts will get chosen).
I'm all for porting cyclone/comment for the sake of Max compatibility. But I'd strongly advise against using cyclone/comment in any patch that's supposed to be used cross-platform (aside from its own help patch, of course).
-Jonathan
cheers