Friday
Nov112005
flash, linux, fonts
Friday, November 11, 2005 at 10:24AM
OpenLaszlo/Flash is more write-once-run-anywhere, more zero-install, than anything else I've developed in. However, the linux flash player has some problems which affect Laszlo Mail:
- There's no 64-bit flash player for linux. If you're running a 64-bit machine, and running Firefox as a 64-bit app, you're just hosed. You'll only see a blank page. We need to add a check for that, somehow. But really, if you're running a 64-bit linux desktop, you're probably a pine devotee, or dyed-in-the-wool thunderbird user. Hell, you're probably a thunderbird contributor if you're running deskt 64-bit linux.
- We embed the true-type for Futura, but we expect client machines to have Verdana. If Verdana isn't present, we request sans, but in certain configurations, the linux flash player displays a serifed font instead. Looks weird and bad; it's a linux flash player bug. Generally, text rendering in flash/linux is not as lovingly massaged as text rendering in windows and mac os x.
The linux distributions I've been playing with (Mandrake 10.2, Mandriva 2006) don't ship with flash player; you have to install it yourself.- Only Flash 7 is available for linux; no flash player 8, which is sad, because flash player 8 is way faster.
- Opera? Oh please. Most of our stuff works in Opera on Linux. I developed in it for a while. There are cetain things which don't work in Opera on Linux, but I'm not sure what they are.
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