[GNC] Fonts blurrier on upgrade to GnuCash 5.8-2 on macOS Sonoma 14.6.1?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

Hello, folks:

I just upgraded from GnuCash 5.6 to GnuCash 5.8-2 (arm64), shortly after 
upgrading macOS from 12.7.6 Monterey to 14.6.1 Sonoma, on an arm64 
machine. On running GnuCash 5.8-2 for the first time, I noticed that 
almost all the text on the main GnuCash window looked more cramped and 
blurrier. This applies to the text under the icons in the toolbar, to 
the text in the account tabs, to the text in the registers, and to the 
text in the reports.

Has anyone else noticed this? Do you have suggestions on how I might 
improve this?

I briefly ran my existing GnuCash 5.6 installation on macOS 14.6.1 
Sonoma after the OS upgrade, and the text looked crisp as expected. Thus 
I suspect that GnuCash 5.8-2 set the font or size in some way which was 
less effective in the Sonoma environment than GnuCash 5.6 settings were 
in the Sonoma or Monterey environments.

One suggestion from the wiki, 
<https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GTK3#Using_the_GTK_Inspector>, is to use 
the GTK Inspector to see what fonts and sizes GnuCash is actually 
getting. I was able to invoke the GTK Inspector by running the GnuCash 
app from the Terminal:

% GTK_DEBUG=interactive /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash

When GnuCash ran this way, the text looked different, and better. It was 
larger, less cramped, crisper, not blurry.

The GTK Inspector says that the font used was ".AppleSystemUIFont 
Regular 12".

When I quit GnuCash, then ran it a third time the conventional way, the 
text was the same smaller size as the first time, but somehow my 
subjective impression was that it was clearer, less fuzzy, less cramped.

When I compared a screen shot of a register's text when GnuCash was run 
normally, and run with GTK_DEBUG=interactive from the command line, the 
latter clearly had taller, wider, and better-separated characters. A 
screen shot of the text from the third, conventional run, had exactly 
the same text size and spacing as the first run. All three sets of text 
were rendered with anti-aliasing.

P.S. the GTK Inspector documentation says that one can enable it using 
"the Control + Shift + I or Control + Shift + D keyboard shortcuts", but 
those key combinations gave me no response. Neither did Command + Shift 
+ I or Command + Shift + D. Can one enable the GTK Inspector from the 
macOS editions of GnuCash 5.8-2?


Any suggestions?