windows fonts in linux?

[xavier30]

Dear Lavaers

I guess this question might be a recurring issue when porting LabVIEW applications between platforms, but i was hoping some of the bright minds here had a solution for this problem.

I was trying to set up a system where users could run a windows (XP) built LabVIEW application, running on a PXI (the PXI currently runs windows, but will probably be running Phar Lap when every thing is finished), and interact with the applications on the PXI trough remote panel from several linux clients (running Red Hat scientific linux 5).

the labview web server on the PXI hosting the VIs work perfectly, but i run into some font issues on the linux client side, causing unwanted cosmetic changes when loading/running the user interface.

In the light of this, i have a few questions:

- have anyone tried porting windows fonts to a red hat based linux system? if so, is it possible to do this without being root, but enforce the necessary setup trough environment variables when calling labview

(the reason i ask the latter is because if i don't have root access to all the client machines)

- Are there any "good" fonts i could use, that would at least interpolate seemingly fine on both platforms?

Unfortunately i am quite inexperienced when it comes to fonts on different platforms, so i don't even know what the system defaults are

I got a few tips from the old lava forum forcing the following in the labview ini file (got this of the goolgle cached pages):

appFont=""Tahoma" 13"

dialogFont=""Tahoma" 13"

systemFont=""Tahoma" 13"

and also from NI:

"Use pixel-based font sizes—Linux Causes LabVIEW to use pixel size instead of point size to select which fonts to load. This checkbox is unchecked by default. Placing a checkmark in this checkbox causes text to be smaller on large (100 dpi) displays but results in higher-quality cross-platform VIs."

( http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361B-01/lvdialog/miscellaneous_options/ )

Am i looking at this the wrong way, or are there any other things that i could do to ensure proper rendering on all platforms?

Any feedback would be appreciated

X

[candidus]

Unfortunately I don't have a recent LabVIEW for Linux so I can't tell you whether this works,

but here are some general hints:

- have anyone tried porting windows fonts to a red hat based linux system? if so, is it possible to do this without being root, but enforce the necessary setup trough environment variables when calling labview

(the reason i ask the latter is because if i don't have root access to all the client machines)

Yes, it's possible. You can create a font directory in your home, copy your fonts there and update your font cache via "fc-cache" utility.

You can find instructions on many places in the web, for example:

http://kbase.redhat..../docs/DOC-17068

http://en.kioskea.ne...ts-under-ubuntu

The latter is for Ubuntu but should work on RedHat, it uses the same font system.

Useful information, especially links you can find in the Ubuntu Wiki (omit the installation section)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts

Not that I'm not using Ubuntu, my system is Debian

[sydney]

I have written some GUIs on Windows and then taken the project over to a Linux machine using SUSE 11.1. There are 2 non .lvproj files, .lvlps and .aliases, that I deleted from the project directory so I could bring the whole project over to my linux machine and still use the project manager. I also noticed that fonts were a big problem! Some of them will not allow choosing sizes that I needed and found that on my machine the Courier series works the best on my 19" monitor, but I had a lot of work to do to get the display to look acceptable since I have a lot of clusters of controls and indicators and arrays of controls and indicators throughout the front panel. Putting a column of a cluster of controls next to an array of different controls was tedious as the fonts made it difficult to get the rows to match up between the various columns which were mixtures of arrays and cluster (necessary!).

I also experimented with changing the 19" to 15" monitor and ran into even more than the ordinary resolution type of problems and had to redo the font sizes again.

Basically, now I make the GUI on the machine that I intend it to run on and then copy the functionality code into a seperate project for each monitor and resolution which is the best that I have come up with on the Linux machines. Windows is a lot easier for chaning fonts and resolutions.

Sydney

[ckis]

Hello,

I'm actually fighting with a similar problem. I need to develop my software in Labview 8.0 on a Kubuntu system but the target system is Suse Linux Enterprise 10.0. I want to use .labviewrc to force appFont, systFont and dialogFont to the same font that of course needs to be installed on both systems.

Unfortunately I ran into different problems:

- I copied the new font to ~/.fonts on Kubuntu, did fc-cache and checked the system settings: the font is available, but Labview doesn't know it in its font list anyway (even after logging out, even after reboot). So my question: where does Labview get this font list?

- many items in the font list are grayed out, so I guess they are not available on the system. But once again, where do those items come from?

- many of the available items fall back to a fixed font. How is this possible if the font is correctly installed?

- many of the available items are really messed up. Again: how is this possible if the font is correctly installed?

- If I try a font available on both systems it still looks different, exept for the fixed fallback font.

Does anybody have an idea, what else I could check out? Or am I just pushing it too hard when I want to run Labview 8.0 on Kubuntu?

Thanks in advance for your help.