The primary goal is to make Pd(-vanilla)'s appearance consistent across
platforms. Part of that is that box sizes don't change when switching
platforms. As a side effect of this fix, patches also don't change
appearance when switching between Pd flavors (Do we still need to care
about Pd-extended, since it's been phased out?).
From what I gathered from the "Pd Metrics on Xubuntu 16 04 02 LTS"
thread, the following steps are required to achieve that goal:
* Adjustments of the font metrics. It seems we can just take the ones
from Pd-extended.
* Use the same font on all platforms. Pd apparently looks for "DejaVu
Sans Mono" first, so that is the one we should make available
everywhere.
On Linux, it's the task of Pd's package maintainers that DejaVu is
installed when Pd is to be installed. If I'm not mistaken, DejaVu is
installed per default on all Debian derivatives, so we do not have to
care about them.
Yup
On Windows, the font is missing and the Pd installer
could be adapted to install the font along with Pd.
That would be the easiest solution. A more complicated but perhaps better solution is to load the font locally when running the GUI.
On macOS, I don’t know what the required steps would be.
I’ve already provided them in the branch. This is working for Mac.
I propose that before we submit any fixes to Miller we are absolutely
certain that the adapted font metrics are correct in that the resulting
box sizes are consistent for all available font sizes (8, 10, 12, 16,
24, 36). And when testing this, we make sure that Pd uses "DejaVu Sans
Mono". Only then we submit any fix.
If we find good font metrics, I'll submit a fix to the NSIS installer
script, so that installing DejaVu is part of the Pd installation
process on Windows. Yet, I'm not sure whether it is enough to simply
drop the font files into %windir%\Fonts or whether the font needs to be
registered somewhere.
Note, I’ve added DejaVu Sans Mono to a “font” folder in the dejavu branch.