Font issue

[Donald Allen]

On 7/19/07, Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/19/07, Josh Sled <jsled at asynchronous.org> wrote:
> > "Donald Allen" <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:
> > > I tried the example .gtkrc-2.0-gnucash. Specifically, I tried changing
> > > the gnc-register font-name from 'Sans 10' to 'Sans 9'. This had the
> > > effect of completely blanking the bottom of any register, so that you
> > > can't see the last N transactions. But when I scrolled up, the earlier
> > > transactions were visible and indeed their appearance was different
> > > than before, in a smaller, less bold font.
> >
> > Huh, that sounds like a bug.  At least the font did change, though. :)
> Bitten by necessary but not sufficient again!
>
> >
> > > Perhaps there is no 'Sans
> > > 9'? And this is the response to that? I have no idea where the font
> > > files are that gnucash uses, so I don't know what my choices are. I
> > > did search the filesystem for '*sans*' and '*Sans*', which didn't turn
> > > up any useful clues. So I'm guessing you are on the right track, but
> > > I'm just not sure what the valid choices are (assuming my guess that I
> > > made an invalid choice is correct).
> >
> > Fonts are provided by font libraries and X Windows.  In this case, Gtk and
> > Pango, which I believe uses freetype.  `xfontsel` might give you the
> > historical x font selector, but `gnome-font-properties` should bring up
> > gnome's font control panel, which is generally nicer to use and might even
> > let you set the default font for other gtk/gnome apps.
>
> Well, gnome-font-properties, which I didn't know about,  did the
> trick. I ran it and set 'Application font' to 9-point Sans (it was
> 10). gnucash was running at the time, and the displayed register got
> quite confused, with parts of it blank, as I described before. BUT, I
> quit and restarted gnucash, and it is now happy and looks much better.
> I didn't mention it before, since this is a gnucash group, but there
> were other apps (e.g., Firefox) that were coming up using too-large,
> too-bold fonts. This change fixed them, too. So thanks very much for
> the suggestion.

Perhaps I declared victory prematurely. Use of gnome-font-properties
as described above does indeed solve the original problem. It
introduces at least two other problems that I've noticed, though.
First, after using it, xterms come up with a light blue background.
All I did was change the application font size, so that's a bit
bizarre. Worse, though, is that its use seems to confuse twm so that
gestures in my twm config file, e.g., m-right-button in the window
body iconifies the window, no longer work. Unless you have an idea for
how to control this stuff do it does only what it says it will do, I
may have to just put up with the ugly font in gnucash. It's just an
esthetic issue (mostly -- the font size forces me to use gnucash in a
full-screen window, so the columns can be wide enough not to truncate
anything).

But, again, I really appreciate your  help with this.

/Don


>
> /Don
>