RE: MW EX, Leopard, and Font Names

["Alain Tougas" <alain@xxxxxxx>]

Hi!
I did some testing... only to confirm your experience. Let me ask the
developers what they think about that I will get back to you. That may take
a day or two.
Alain Tougas

-----Original Message-----
From: mwforum-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:mwforum-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Timothy
Klein
Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2008 8:46 PM
To: mwforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: MW EX, Leopard, and Font Names


I recently wrote a MW EX project (version 1.6) on Mac OS X. It uses
programable text, so I have to wade into the morass of cross-platform
fonts.

I have a text box, called "Letters Font," which will set a font in
":txtbx" for me, like so:

   talkto :txtbx
   [...]
   top select bottom
   carefully
     [setfont |Letters Font|]
     [ ... error code ... ]

Font names don't really seem to be what you would expect. Some font
names, generally Apple-supplied ones, are predictable: "Maker Felt,"
"Times," and "Courier" work as expected, when typed into the "Letters
Font" text box, for instance. But "Times New Roman," "Arial," and
"Comic Sans" do not: they fail with the following message:

   setfont does not like Times New Roman as input.

In my font menu, the names are actually rather bungled: "Times New
Roman" is displayed as "Times New RomanBold." This is a bug, I think,
but using *that* name is of no help. Finding the file "Times New
Roman.ttf" and opening it in FontBook.app, I searched "Font Info" for
all conceivable names of "Times New Roman": none worked.

There seems to be no way to query a text box for its current font, to
see what *MicroWorlds* thinks the name is.

I downloaded the demo of MW EX 1.6 for WinXP, to try this on my old
Dell laptop. Everything works fine on that platform: "Times New Roman"
et al. work.

Is this a bug, or is there something I can do to fix this? All of the
cross-platform, web-safe fonts that I *really* need to use here are
not accessible on my Mac (and maybe others) via name. I have to use
"Courier."

I now have an aluminum iMac, so it runs Mac OS X, 10.5 Leopard, with
an Intel Core2 duo, with which I must run MW EX 1.6 under Rosetta, if
that matters. I don't seem to remember my font names always being
mangled in the "Text->Font" menu, but maybe they have been.

If you really want to see the file, it's on my public iDisk:

   http://idisk.mac.com/kleinsheets-Public

The file name is "alphabet.mwx."

Sincerely,

Timothy Klein
--
kleinvox @t mac d0t com
tklein @t openworldlearning d0t org