[Tech] Application Front Redndering Issue

[James Howard]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2011, Robbie Socks wrote:

> Hi again James. Sorry to bug you however, my wife wants to leave town on Friday around 3pm. So I don't think I can make that time. Are you still going to do the install? Can
> we push it till next week? Thanks and sorry about the mix up. Excited to rape up my Linux skills. -Robbie
>

I will be by the lab today to put out an unrelated fire. 
Not sure I'll have time to look at Yearbook Suite (YS) 
today. I have some bad news in that YS has not been playing 
nicely with Linu.

Having played with YS under several flavors of Linux 
(Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu) , I've noticed a problem -- the 
application fonts (those are the fonts used for the 
program's menus, control panels, and so forth) render funny 
(slightyl large). At times, this renders the them illegible 
and the program becomes difficult (if not impossible) to 
use. I haven't had a chance to look at the MS Windows or 
Mac OSX release of the software to see if it experiences 
the same problem.

I notice that the program was developed on some version of 
Visual Basic (a Microsoft development technology), and then 
ported to Linux. In fact, while the software is listed as 
"Freeware", I don't see that it's necesarily Free Software 
-- not sure if you are are of the difference ("free as in 
free beers" vs "free as in freedom"). It doesn't ship with 
a license, I don't see any source code, and I do not see 
any comunity involvement in its development.  As faras I 
can tell, no Linux distribution ships with YS. While this 
isn't necesarily a problem for us, it may explain the why 
the GUI layout is rigid and the fonts are rendering oddly.

We had a similar problem with a web based Java applet 
developed by Sanford called EPGY last year. After several 
weeks of pulling otur hair out, the tech and I eventualy 
arrive at a sulution and I haven't heard any complaints 
since. It boiled down to the program depending on some MS 
Windows TTF, which we were able to deploy and map to the 
application. Unfortunately, I've run YS on the machines we 
modified for EPGY, and the problem persists.

I'll have to investigate further to see if what we can do 
about YS. I'm not sure how invested you are i the tool. 
Looking at Sourceforge, I noticed some alternatives that 
may be worth checking out. I'm not sure


In any event, I'll be in the lab hopefully later this 
morning and until mid afternoon.
-James