Re: [XForms] Another question on fonts...

[Jens Thoms Toerring]

Hi Serge,

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 12:06:33PM -0400, Serge Bromow wrote:
> I found the same problem when I moved to a new OS. The fonts were
> there but the system choose 100dpi instead of 75dpi which I was
> apparently using. All the programs exhibited large fonts. I fixed
> this by adding the following before fl_initialize;
> 
> fl_set_font_name(FL_NORMAL_STYLE,
> "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-?-*-75-*-*-*-*");
> [...]

That's one way to make sure that the 75dpi fonts are
definitely used by that application. A different method,
if my memory isn't playing tricks, would be to change the
"font path" on the system. You can get the current setting
(with some other information) with the command

> xset q

Now, if the directories with the 100dpi fonts come before
the ones with the 75dpi fonts, then, when no pixel reso-
lution is set explicitely in the XLFD font name, the
first one in the path is used. If you change the font
path to something where the 75dpi fonts come first with
the appropriate 'xset' command

> xset fp=path[,path...]

followed by

> xset fp rehash

This should make this a system-wide setting if done early
enough.

Thebackground to this whole mess is, I think, that in
former times lower-resolution screens (with about 75 dpi)
were the most common and thus the default setting was to
have the corresponding fonts first in the path. Later most
people switched to higher-resolution screens and thus the
default was changed to have the 100 dpi fonts first in the
font path. But that led to some trouble with programs that
were designed to work with 75 dpi fonts...

If I'm not mistaken the function fl_adjust_form_size() was
introduced to solve exactly this problem: it checks if
(inside) labels fit into their objects and, if not, scale
up the form by a factor, which can't be larger than 1.25.
So adding a call of this function somewhere after the forms
have been created might be another way to get around the
problem.

Unfortunately, nothing of this will help if the core X11 fonts
aren't even installed on a system:-(

                      Best regards, Jens
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