Re: [XForms] Another question on fonts

[oleuthold]

I have been using Mint distros (Ubuntu derivative) for several years now 
and run
into the font problems with my GUIs, because the fonts required by the 
xforms
library are no longer part of the default installation. (You can use 
xfontsel to
see the fonts installed on your system, and available to xforms.)
Recently I have made some modifications to lib/fonts.c and demos/fonts.c 
in the
xforms-1.2.4 library, which allowed me to make the following observations:
- xforms installs a substitute if a particular font is not available. On my
    system this is 
-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1
- this substitute comes with fixed size; requests for other sizes have 
no effect.
- for an installed font, the final font size is chosen according to the 
specified
    point size, with pointsize=10*size (if available). This behavior is 
not desirable
    for GUI building, because the widgets are specified in terms of 
pixels, not points.
- the system chooses 75dpi or 100dpi fonts, whatever fits best for the 
particular size.
- scaled fonts are generally ugly and not usable.
Because the behavior is so unpredictable, it is probably best to limit 
the number of
fonts in a GUI and use font specifications which include specific sizes, 
as suggested
by other authors. However the case of automatic font substitution still 
needs to be
addressed for systems where the default xforms fonts are not installed.
I can make the modified library available on request.
Best wishes
    Oskar



On 10/23/2014 10:35 AM, address@hidden wrote:
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>     1. Re: Another question on fonts... (Serge Bromow)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:35:05 -0400
> From: Serge Bromow <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [XForms] Another question on fonts...
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"
>
> NOW YOU TELL ME!!! lol...
>
> Thanks Jens
>
> On 10/21/2014 03:00 PM, Jens Thoms Toerring wrote:
> > 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