Figure 1: Font vs. Font — FontTest.SCX shows the relative sizes of text in Segoe UI vs. Tahoma vs. Arial.

User Interface

One of the first things you notice about Vista is that its user interface is much more attractive than its previous versions. While some decry this as "eye candy," having a great looking desktop makes using your computer more interesting and fun and hopefully makes you more productive, although that's tough to measure.
There are several things you can do with your VFP applications to make them more Vista-like, including selecting Vista fonts, using the new dialogs, and creating new icons.

Font Selection
Operating systems before Vista use MS Sans Serif as the system font. MS Sans Serif isn't a TrueType or ClearType font, so it doesn't scale very well at different resolutions, making it difficult to create a form that looks good under all conditions **Possible Pull Quote**. As a result, most VFP developers use the default font for VFP controls, Arial, or some other TrueType font (I prefer Tahoma), which means VFP forms look different than system dialogs.

Vista introduces a new system font: Segoe UI (pronounced "SEE-go"). It's a ClearType font designed specifically for user interfaces. As a result, it scales nicely and is the recommended font for all dialogs. For more information about Segoe UI, see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511295.aspx.

As you can see in Table 1, Segoe UI's font characteristics are similar to Tahoma. Note that the average character width (FONTMETRIC(6)) for Segoe UI is slightly larger than Tahoma but the maximum width (FONTMETRIC(7)) is slightly smaller. As a result, strings tend to be roughly the same width in both fonts, and both are a little smaller than Arial text.

The source code for this article includes FontTest.SCX (figure 1), which shows the relative sizes of text in Segoe UI vs. Tahoma vs. Arial. Enter the text and the size to test, then click the Measure TXT button to measure the text size as it would appear in a form (using TXTWIDTH(Text, Font, Size) * FONTMETRIC(6, Text, Font, Size)) or the Measure GDI+ button to measure the text size as it would appear in a report (using the FFC GDI+ classes).

Because your applications may run on both Windows Vista and older operating systems, you may wish to use Segoe UI when the application runs on Vista and Tahoma when it runs on Windows XP or earlier. To do this, change your base classes to select the font based on the operating system using code similar to this in the Init method:

if os(3) >= '6'
  This.FontName = 'Segoe UI'
else
  This.FontName = 'Tahoma'
endif os(3) >= '6'