make app-fonts retina ready

General
1

Apart from the graphics, fonts are essential to a retina display ready app. Even when I use retinizer, the fonts in the app look blurry on a retina screen. Also using the method from the xojo user guide book 4 doesn’t help (see below). Why is it so difficult to make use of crisp fonts?

Xojo User Guide Book 4:
Enabling Retina Support
To enable retina support, you need set the
NSHighResolutionCapable key to True in the Info.plist in the
application bundle.
You can do this by creating your own Info.plist file as follows and
dragging it into your project:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
"
http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd
">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
     <key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
     <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

This enables retina support for the UI elements, such as buttons
and text.
Alternatively, you can use Build Automation to add this key to the
plist file after your application is built

2

Just hang on a bit… supposedly the next version of XOJO will have native Retina support

3

let’s hope so.

4

The plist method, although tedious, definitely does work. Take a look at these two example projects:

Examples/Platform-Specific/OS X/Plist/EnableRetina
Examples/Platform-Specific/OS X/RetinaDisplay/RetinaDisplay

I just ran both here on OS X 10.11.3 and I get sharp fonts.

With that said, the next version of Xojo will make this much, much simpler.

5

Are you using labels or canvases?

Download the demo version of the Retina Kit and run it, if the text in the Retina Kit looks nice and sharp; you have a baseline. Then all you need to do is to figure out what you’re doing differently in your application.

http://www.ohanaware.com/retinakit/