How do I specify the fonts I want to use?

[Dave Reiser]

Steve Drach wrote:
> For the standard display, not reports?  You may remember I had a  
> problem running GC last week and folks recommended I upgrade.   
> Updating fink packages solved the problem.  Then I upgraded Xquartz  
> and now I have a different font, that while pleasant enough is too big  
> for me.  So how do I change it?
> 
> GC 2.2.9, Mac OS/X 10.5.6, XQuartz 2.3.2

I font change you see is most likely just a size change because xquartz 
finally made the default screen resolution something close to what 
nearly all the macs have.

The answer is supposed to be "install gnome-control-center and use the 
Appearance applet to set your default application font for gnome". The 
fink package name for g-c-c is control-center. But it is still launched 
by the command "gnome-control-center".

Unfortunately, right now gnome-settings-daemon (used by g-c-c and gconf) 
is misbehaving quite badly by refusing to launch. When that happens, 
you're stuck with the fallback default font.

Sometimes, depending on which versions of things are installed (and 
maybe the phase of the moon), you can manually launch 
gnome-settings-daemon with the command 
"/sw/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon". If that succeeds, 
you can launch g-c-c and pick your font. As long as the x11 session is 
open, it will remember the font settings. If you quit gnucash and the 
x11 app, then you'll have to manually relaunch g-s-d again before 
gnucash will be able to recognize your selected font. You won't have to 
repick the font-- it's in your gconf settings, but gnucash can't see it 
unless g-s-d is running. I find it helpful to have gnucash running when 
I pick the font, so I can see the effects before I quit control-center.

Development versions of g-s-d are somewhat better (but not available in 
fink yet, since there are plenty of bug issues with gnome devel 
versions), but they haven't fixed the fundamental problem of g-s-d 
failing to autolaunch for x11 sessions. This may be a mac-specific bug, 
but there are plenty of grumblings in the ubuntu realm about g-s-d not 
launching there either.

Dave
-- 
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net