[clean-list] Font Size Problem?

Al Christians achrist@easystreet.com
Sun, 07 Jan 2001 01:48:26 -0800


I downloaded the Clean system and ran several of the demo programs
on Win NT (4.0 SP5) and it looks very nice, except ...

Some of the demos don't look good, probably because my system is set
up to use large fonts.  For example, in the Scrabble game, all the 
controls don't show on the game screen when it opens.  I can expand
the screen vertically to see what gets chopped off the bottom (I think),
but horizontally is more of a problem -- I can't get all of the button 
to place a word to stay on the board.  Also, the messages that show in 
the little black box in the scrabble board don't all fit in the box, 
and there is no way that I see to scroll the contents of the box to 
see what has been chopped off.

This is no crime; lots of software has problems run under large fonts
-- eg Tcl programs often have exactly the same problems, items off
screen with no way to get them back.  Is there any way to fix this?
I develop software (using Delphi, mostly) with large fonts and 
distribute it to customers, and I know that most machines are set to 
use small fonts.  I know that my screens will sometimes look bad when 
run under small fonts, but I think that it is rare that text is 
seriously truncated and information is lost, because small fonts will 
usually fit in the space that large fonts used.  Sometimes I use a 
library that is supposed to resize everything so that the run-time
appearance matches the design-time appearance regardless of screen 
size and font size, but this is not 100% reliable.

Not to complain, just noting a problem and expressing appreciation in
advance if there is anything you can do to make the apps less likely 
to suffer these difficulties.  I only switch to small fonts to give
my apps a once-over before shipping.  My vision is not good enough 
to be comfortable with this day-to-day.