Fonts

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Hi guys, I've come across somewhat of an annoyance rather than a problem, on Windows I use the font Consolas along with the Lucida Grande and Segoe UI fonts when I am coding in rev and I have ported these across to Ubuntu 10.04 and for some reason they do not show up in the list of fonts in Rev. The fonts are correctly installed and registered with the system as I can use them in Firefox and Chrome along with other applications, do you think this could be a bug with Ubuntu or Rev?

Has anyone else experienced this or am I a little boat in the middle of a rough Atlantic.

[Mark]

mickpitkin92,

This is a known problem with Rev 4.0 and earlier. It should be solved in 4.5.

Best,

Mark

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Ok Mark, thanks for the heads up.

Any ideas what caused the bug?

[Mark]

mickpitkin92 ,

I'm not sure this could be called a bug. It was just badly implemented font management by the RunRev team and, apparently, insufficient interest in Revolution for Linux. It seems there is more interest in the Linux version now and RunRev decided to fix it.

Best,

Mark

[SirWobbyTheFirst]

Oh ok, well thanks for the info.

[FourthWorld]

This was indeed resolved with v4.5, along with a number of other Linux issues.

There was a major push on the Linux engine in v4.5 - here's a few from the v4.5 Release Notes:

Linux – font support improvements
The font support in the Linux engine has been completely overhauled.
The engine now uses the pango library for all text layout, and renders text using the xft library. Additionally, the fontNames and related global properties will now reflect the full collection of fonts installed on the system via the fontconfig mechanism (this is the font selection system that powers pango).

Legacy font support

If the linux distribution does not have the necessary libraries installed, the engine will fallback to using the old X11 font mechanism. This has vastly reduced support for unicode text, and renders without anti-aliasing.

You can force this fallback by passing -xftoff as a command-line parameter to the engine.

Linux – themeing improvements

Some work has been done to improve the appearance of applications on Linux. Although still not perfect, the native theme support should now correctly handle themes that have a transparent/alpha blended background on some of their parts.
In particular, the default theme in the latest distributions such as Ubuntu 10 look much improved.

Linux – ssl improvements

In order to provide ssl and industrial strength encryption, the engine utilizes the OpenSSL library. However, the OpenSSL team does not, unfortunately, guarantee binary compatibility between different versions. This has long caused an issue for the engine on Linux where the specific version the engine needs may not be present.
In order to solve this issue, the linux engine no longer depends on any installed OpenSSL library and will, instead, (attempt to) load revsecurity.so.
This loadable library is a custom build of the latest OpenSSL distribution (1.0.0a at time of writing) and includes both the ssl and crypto components.

Runtime dependency

This change introduces a new (optional) runtime dependecy for linux standalones. The standalone builder will automatically include this in the appropriate place when building standalones that have specified a need for the 'SSL and Security' library.
Any custom code that deals with standalones which use this feature must make sure that the revsecurity library resides next to the engine executable.