Cross Platform Fonts

[Peter Fenner]

I use Geneva 9pt and 10pt as my main text and Verdana for cases where I have limited width (in portals for example) and have some line entries returning a Bold entry. I use a Mac. Is Geneva cross-platform and does it use the same percentage of field space on a Pc and Mac? From some little knowledge of web page design I seem to recall 9points on a PC is about 20% bigger on a PC. Is this correct?

Pete

[cjaeger]

yes. But substitute Geneva for Arial, since Geneva is a Mac-only font.

When you design cross-platform on the Mac, make sure you use a point size that is at least 1-2 points bigger than the target size. Then open on PC and reduce the font size to target.

But be aware of 11 point text. FileMaker seems to behave strangely with 11 points ...

[danjacoby]

Arial for sans serif, and Times (or Times New Roman) for serif are the standards; some people don't have Verdana (it didn't come preloaded on my computer, for instance, and I just bought it two months ago).

As cj says, font sizes are generally larger on Windows than on Mac; you have to allow for this when determining field sizes.

[Peter Fenner]

Thanks - Got It!

Pete

[RussBaker]

And I've been having trouble with Helvetica in some of my stuff. I had a solutions using Helvetica 12 which worked fine in Mac 8.6, Mac 9.2 and Windows, but in OSX it looks rubbish. And its only Helvetica 12 and only in Filemaker! No amount of playing with the font smoothing options seems to fix it. Still looking for workarounds before I go in and change all my layouts.

Anoyone else come across this?

[TSilvan]

I have stopped using Helvetica altogether because I cannot get it to look right in Mac Classic, but it is looking ok in OS X.

Funny that you seem to be having problems the other way around. Is it possible that your copy of helvetica in the system is damaged?

[Lee Smith]

Hi Russ,

By chance did the installation of OS X, change your default Helvetica font from Post Script to TrueType? I had a similar problem with a change in OS from 7 to 8 (if I remember right) with Times.

Lee

[HazMatt]

This may or may not affect any decisions, but I've heard that a font on a PC will be slightly different than the same exact font on a Mac. But I use Arial and Arial Narrow and they seem to behave well enough for the most part. Actually, my biggest problem is remembering to install the Narrow version on PCs.