Describe the problems you are likely to encounter in creating a cross-platform program, and list several ways to deal with these problems.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Major hurdles are faced while moving multimedia projects across platforms. If the project uses only bitmapped images and sounds, the text issue is moot. There are problems of sizes, shapes, colors, fonts and special character set. To overcome these problems with text there are certain tips. For text in boxes, center the text, leaving plenty of space or margin to avoid possible word-wrap on the other platform. Avoid outline and shadow styles on the Macintosh. They are not currently supported in Windows and may default to boldface. When the look of a larger-size font is extremely important, turn it into a bitmap by screen capturing before you convert. If Adobe ATM or TrueType fonts are used the fonts must be installed and available on both platforms, or must be embedded in the playback application. As far as the color is concerned when a Macintosh 256-color graphics file is converted to Windows, all colors are mapped to their nearest equivalents and the results depend on the color palettes.