Always use the "nina" fonts!

[Guest The PocketTV Team]

We discovered an important issue:

If you want your Smartphone roman-language applications to work well on all Smartphones, including those localized for other languages, such as the i-Mate arabic Smartphone, or those with chinese, indian, etc, you *must* make sure that all the dialog resources in your .rc file make explicitely reference to the "nina" font.

"nina" (and "ninab") is the only fully-scalable roman font that is guaranteed to be present in *all* Smartphones, regardless of localization (arabic, chinese, indian, hebrew, etc).

If your dialog resources make reference to other fonts, such as "Arial" or "Tahoma", then font substitution will happen at run-time, and depending on the fonts present in the ROM of the Smartphone, a different font will be used, and the size may be different from what you observe on your test device or on the emulator. We experienced this problem with PocketTV.

This can cause some dialogs to appear incorrectly, clipped, and sometimes made un-usable. You can see an example in this thread: http://smartphone.modaco.com/viewtopic.php?t=88413 . In this case the problem was critical, as the registration code appeared clipped in the dialog!

If the Nina font is not installed on your development PC, you cannot set the dialog font to "Nina" in the "Properties" box for the dialog. In that case the resource .rc file needs to be edited by hand.

But it is easy to install the nina font on your development PC: Use the "Remote File Viewer" tool from eVC to copy the nina.ttf (and ninab.ttf) font file from a Smartphone to your development machine - copy the font files to your c:WindowFonts folder, and they will install automatically.

Once the nina font is installed on your development PC, edit your resources with eVC, and for each dialog resource, select the dialog window and right click to select "properties...", then set the dialog font to "nina". Then check that the dialog display properly. They should then display always the same on all Smartphones.

[Guest MECX]

as i remember nina and ninab are the only fonts in the ROM for all smartphone 2002 devices. it would be good to be able to use custom fonts so maybe next OS a writable fonts folder may be employed??

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

Moved to development.