Fun with MacOS (NOT) [was Re: Announceing subsurface 1.2]

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2011 19:29:52 +0200, "Lubomir I. Ivanov" <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Dirk Hohndel" <dirk at hohndel.org>
> >
> > So it turns out that apparently only a few of the fonts on the Mac
> > correctly render the UTF8 characters that I used for the star rating.
> >
> 
> looks like the stars aren't rendered on my winxp as well.

Weird. Looks perfectly fine on Win7. I was just about to make a snide
comment about that in public.

> (and very portable in that sense across os's/fonts)
> these glyphs seem quite exotic, infact:
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2605/fontsupport.htm
> 
> the only windows font i recognize in the above list is
> "Arial Unicode MS", yet i don't have it installed (not sure why).
> apprently fonts that are default (i think) on gnome like "dejavu sans" and 
> "libertine" have them.
> 
> i can suggest the white/black circle (or square) instead, which seem much more 
> portable:
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25cf/fontsupport.htm
> 
> #define UTF8_WHITESTAR "\xe2\x97\x8b"
> #define UTF8_BLACKSTAR "\xe2\x97\x8f"
> 
> but the default subsurface UI font - "Sans" is a bit silly and has the white 
> cicle bigger (for the square as well), over here - which does not make any 
> sense, considering these are part of the "Geometric Shapes" table.

I think I'll simply give up on rendering this with fonts and do it as
little images instead. Oh well.

> on the other hand, if stars are really prefered, perhaps gtk supports loading an 
> image / icon in the list or combobox. this could end being being "a lot of 
> fun"...

I'll need to do that to get a reasonable user experience where you just
click on the stars to set the rating. I have this half implemented but
am a bit pressed for time to complete it :-/

> > The good news (off topic, given the Subject: of this email) is that I
> > have a working Windows installer up on the website (please test when you
> > get a chance... so far this has only been run in a VM with Win7)
> 
> the installer seems to be missing the xslt runtime - libxslt-1.dll,
> but it works ok: installs into "program files" and ask if the user he wants to 
> store the settings.

You must have gotten it before I fixed that but. It now should have ALL
the libs that you need.

The Mac installer, on the other hand, has all the files included but
somehow doesn't always install all of them - and I have no idea why. It
seems if you already have a library with the same name and a lower
version (WTF???) it doesn't overwrite this. So I'm playing with the idea
of moving copies of all libraries into /Applications/Subsurface 
Which is funny, as that is manually recreating DLL hell from Windows on
a Unix type system that /could/ easily get this right.

But again, I don't have the time right now to /really/ figure out what's
going wrong there.

/D