As many of you will now know, I have been writing a new examples application to coincide with the OpenInsight version 9.0 release. This application has been completely written using my Vista Home Premium machine.
Now, not being overly technical, I usually opt for defaults when installing software – it usually helps when I get myself into a mess as the support guys know where to find things. Anyway, choosing default options on this occasion has left me with something of a headache – mainly because I had planned to give my application to WORKS subscribers and most of you will have wisely stayed with Windows XP.
The issue is that Vista has a lovely new font called Segoe and I understand that Microsoft have set this as the default font for Vista. In turn, my OpenInsight installation picked this up as the chosen default font when creating a new application. I only noticed this when I dropped the application onto a colleague’s XP machine to show them how nice it looked. Needless to say, it looked awful as the XP default font on that machine was wider than Segoe and caused the text on my buttons and labels run off the controls.
Not to worry I thought. Sprezzatura have a friend in Microsoft and I’ll check that it is OK for me to include the Segoe font with my application – problem solved. But Oh no – It is covered under license and you can not freely distribute it. So my options are:
- License the font for each user.
- Get the user to upgrade to Vista, buy one of the Windows Live packages or Office 2007 (all of which I understand have the new font (but do your own homework before buying)).
- Change the font on every window and resize the controls as applicable.
- Only support Vista with my application.
Needless to say, as my application is primarily for demo purposes on my machine, I’ll be choosing option 4 for the moment.
BUT be warned. If you are planning a move to Vista, make sure that you use a common font such as Arial when designing and building your applications.
My advice – stick with XP Pro for the moment!!!
Useful tip Martyn. This blog is looking like being useful. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget to check in the opposite direction as well. We've run into problems (specifically with Arial Narrow), of a font that has existed in XP (and prior versions of Windows), and does not appear on Vista machines.
ReplyDelete