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Filemaker optimal layout size4/10/2023 ![]() ![]() A lot of the 40+ fonts are quite fancy, and not really suited. Why those 2? Again, I was looking for a sans-serif font for field and layout text use, so it needed to be simple and easy to read on screen. I picked 2 of those fonts, and re-ran our tests on font height : Name The range of font options goes from 11 to over 50, just by installing MS Office. If you’re in an environment where MS Office is installed on all the machines you’re running FileMaker on (which is quite common in a corporate environment, but harder to control elsewhere) your options for fonts that exist on both platforms expands quite a bit. There are a lot of applications that install additional fonts that are available for all applications on the same computer. If you’re selling a end-user product you’ve probably got less choice. Well if you’re running in an environment where you have control over the platform, you may be able to add to your options. The other interesting stat from that list is that you’ll fit more actual characters into a fixed block with Arial than you will with Verdana. However, if you take the data at face value as being indicative for all different text contents, then Arial is the clear winner here, although compared to say Georgia, Verdana didn’t fare that badly. That would take a while, and I haven’t done it this time. I think to get any real handle on the differences you’d need to re-run the test for each of the characters in the basic alphabet and compare again. The percentage difference in length for the text changed for all of the fonts, but in different ways. Then I thought I should probably cover a larger set of characters, and changed it to “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” What I’ve actually done is probably to average out the differences in individual character lengths. When I first set this test up, I had the text “This is some text.” and I used that as my comparison point. So “iii” is much shorter than “So that means that some text will be longer, some shorter, it just depends on which characters you chose, and how many of them are used. What’s worse is that every different text block is going to have different lengths.Įvery character in a “monospaced” font such as courier new, is the same length, and conversely with every other font each character is a different length. What about text length? The short version is that no font is the same on both platforms. So although these fonts might be able to work on short text like field labels, in long text blocks they’re going to be significantly larger or smaller depending on the choice of fonts and sizes. Meaning that a 1 pixel height difference will add up, and text with 3 lines will have 3 pixels different. The most frustrating part of this is that the differences, of mostly 1 pixel in height, are cumulative. Well what about 11pt? Yes, and the situation improves, we have 3 fonts that are the same, Arial Black, Comic Sans and Verdana.Īt 12 pt, everything else is bigger on windows, and Trebuchet MS is 4 pixels bigger! At 11 pt, with the rest of the fonts there is still a difference of 1-2 pixels for most of them. Arial Black… Not exactly my favorite choice for on screen display. So are any of our 11 fonts the same height at 12 pt? Yes, one of them. This all breaks if you have different font heights on different platforms. I get picky about text height, for example, I size my portals to the same height as the text in it, so when you edit the text, it all looks neat. This was the one that bugged me the most, I think because I develop on a mac, and I just know that Arial is bigger on Windows and when you see 11pt Arial in windows that has been created and resized on a mac, the bottom of characters like “y” are slightly cut off. To test this, I’ve setup a file with some basic text in a block, one copy for each of the fonts I outlined previously and then resized it to fit in both windows and mac at 11 pt and 12 pt.įirst, text height. Verdana is very different in lengths, but closer in heights. If you’d asked me before I’d actually tested it, I would have said, Arial is shorter on mac than windows, but they’re pretty close in length. This time I’ll look at how both platforms display the standard fonts in FileMaker Pro. My previous article listed all of the fonts that are common to both Windows XP and MacOS X.
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