While we were developing the initial versions of WithStyle we discovered some interesting font lookup issues in VisualWorks.

First and foremost was to do with font sizing. It appeared that font sizes were slightly larger for the the equivalent lookup in VW to all other windows applications. This puzzled us until we found the following page: http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/How+to+match+the+font+size+between+VW+and+Windoze+apps

However once we'd applied this patch we found that the default system fonts now had wacky font sizes. With help from Steve Kelly we were able to fix these font size change issues with several overrides and re-initializations.

We also found that on Mac, some of the generic font names that you use on Linux and Windows simply failed to lookup on Mac. We had to 'harden' the way font matching works in VW as well as mapping generic font names such as serif -> times, monospace -> courier, etc.

So, all of this stuff combined made for some messy stuff that was hidden away in WithStyle. Yesterday I separated this code out in to its own package so that you can choose whether you want to use Windows standard font size lookups and generic font names on Mac. I've published this code as Font-Lookup in to public store. Your choice.. go for it.