Has anyone had any luck with running Formatted Text Control on Linux?
No, I managed to make it work with an old version of FTC 1.1. But after that never.
You should contact Bob Keeney.
He is the owner of FTC.
http://www.bkeeney.com/formatted-text-control
I did, but he says they’re not interested in Linux
Sorry. We get 1, maybe 2 people that are interested in it a year.
I did a quick check in Ubuntu and I immediately get a segmentation fault when trying to open the demo window. It might be something we’ve did with assumptions (it’s either Mac or it’s running in Windows) or something in the Xojo framework. I’ll spend a little time looking at it and maybe put in a feedback report.
FWIW, I know that Brendan (original developer) looked into before we acquired it. If memory serves he couldn’t get it to work because the Xojo framework wasn’t up to snuff compared to Mac and Windows. This was several years ago so that might have been resolved. But then we get back to the ‘is it worth our time’ question with so few developers asking for it.
Bob:
Your answer explains a lot (as side effect).
Bob:
We get 1, maybe 2 people that are interested in it a year.
I recently check some very old project and found that some does not compiles anymore.
Maybe setting TFC working for Linux lets you find things to on the end will let you propose a better (all platforms) FTC. (correct some errors that leads to a working Linux version, and also a better OS X and Windows versions).
FWIW, I did submit a Feedback report yesterday in regard to a segment fault I was getting in the FTC demo project
FYI,
Originally I wanted to support linux, but it became to difficult to do so because of various technical problem that could not be solved. One example was font scaling where OSX and Windows do a good job of scaling text to a larger font size. In linux it seemed to be more desecrate in its scaling where there was a 12 point and the next jump was to 16 point. So if the FTC needed a 13 point font to do scaling of the display, you would get the 16 point font and this would mess up the line wrapping and cause lines to spill over their drawing boundaries…bad mojo! So the FTC can work under linux, but there are some definite caveats. Certain features like scaling in page mode won’t work properly. There were other problems, but I don’t remember what they were.
Bob, the other reasons I dropped linux support is two fold. First, the xojo middleware is not as mature on linux as it is on OSX and Windows which leads to a poor programming experience or it could be linux itself. In other words, it is a tough road to travel with lots of potholes. The second is all the variants of linux under the sun, it is nuts! Who wants to take all that testing effort for a market that is only a tiny fraction of the FTC user base. My suggestion is to not support linux. It was a bag of hurt when I had the FTC under me and it is probably the same bag of hurt today. If your user base wants linux support they could do the work themselves as a collective effort and you could roll the changes back into the base as administrator.
Thanks for the history, Brendan!
FWIW, I have been able to get FTC working (mostly) in Ubuntu. It’s having problems with the Embedded FTC but it’s working reasonably well in the other tests. The hard crash was the result of a bad system declare in Linux.
So if you want to use it in Linux you can, with the caveats that Brendan listed above. Of course, since you get the source code you can modify to your hearts content and if you feel like sharing we can merge Linux specific changes back into the release.