On Die, 2017-02-21 at 19:33 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
Ok, seems we have yet another thread to keep discussing a same topic that I kinda started. Anyway, if the focus of the debate has changed indeed, I suggest changing the thread name and adding (was: "xxxx" <= old thread subject), in this case: (was: (wip) Preferences file).
So, I did bring this up, how patches look differently in vanilla according to the operating system, and how they look different from extended / purr data (which, on their own, look consistent in all platforms and also look like each other!).
Changing the font metrics from Vanilla to extended's/purr data's doesn't compromise the patch as the other way around does. Cause opening extended patches in the vanilla's metrics does compromise the visual experience a lot, creating all sorts of overlaps... I already pointed this out in the previous threads.
So, keeping it objective and not to repeat myself too much, I consider this an issue, an undesired behaviour, a bug, whatever, and I hope we could fix it. Any opposition? What is the best way to do this?
This is my view on the matter:
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. On Windows, the font is missing and the Pd installer could be adapted to install the font along with Pd. On macOS, I don't know what the required steps would be.
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.
Roman