Re: [gentoo-user] Font sizes very small in KDE

[Holly Bostick]

Stewart Taylor schreef:
> Hi All
>
> I've got a problem with the display under KDE. I've just installed
> Gentoo for the first time. Under KDE the font sizes are very small
> compared with what they should be. Compared with the same hardware
> under Suse 8.0 all text displays a little over half the size. this
> affects KDE apps and non KDE apps the same. Firefox text on menus and
>  the like is so small that it is unusable. On one of my own programs
>  the 14 point text displays as if it were 8-9 point. I have a Matrox
>  Millennium G400 graphics card. I've tried all the settings i can
> find and have tried different kernel modules settings without
> success. The info I found on the web left me confused as it seems
> that this card may have different names in the UK and US. I'm in the
> UK.
>
> TIA
>
> Stewart

I find this situation a constant annoyance as well. You have,
unfortunately, several issues involved, none of which is completely
resolveable until everybody is on board with the freedesktop.org
standard, but you can get everything to a reasonably stable state that
you can deal with.

The problem (and I must regretfully point out that most of the problem
seems to be KDE, but we'll get to that):

You run KDE. Fine; KDE controls its fonts, you set your fonts to
whatever you like and they look OK (all right, yours don't, quite, but
you can obviously hack them into shape by running them at some
ridiculously high point size. I've also noticed that KDE seems to make
fonts look smaller than I would imagine they should, and I don't know
why, so I just hack them into useability). Then you open Firefox. Which is a
GTK program and whose font size (for menus and the like, not page
display which is controlled by the program) is controlled by the GNOME
control panel (or gtk2rc, but in any case GNOME/GTK, and not KDE).  So
GTK apps are now running essentially unconfigured fonts and font sizes,
so they look like sh*t. Plus KDE is (naturally) trying to control this
window (because it's a window on the KDE desktop), and is unable to
really do so, so that just makes things a bit worse (more on this later
as well). Furthermore you also have X trying to control the font size
for one or more reasons (maybe you have a font server running, maybe
you're running 'uncontrolled' programs which start with an 'X' rather
than a 'K' or a 'G', and of course X is ultimately responsible for
displaying all display elements anyway).

So the situation is that basically "too many cooks spoil the soup". At
least, that's the *first* problem, which we'd have to clear away before
we could be sure that your video card is doing what it should (which I
think it probably is; I have a G400 Max which I used till about a year
or so ago under Linux, and it was really the most trouble-free card I've
used).

Here's what you want to do:

1. emerge x11-themes/gtk-engines-qt. This little GTK engine will add a
couple of entries to the KDE control center which will allow KDE to
control not only the color of GTK apps (which kcontrol already does
before the installation of this engine, check the Appearance and
Themes=> Colors section for the checkbox), but the theme and the fonts
as well, so they can be conformed. Be aware, the themes will only be
conformed for GTK2 applications, and only those which do not theme
themselves (as Firefox does, for example). So any GTK1 apps you might
run will not look so much better (except that the colors will be right),
unless you do what I do, which is run a theme which is designed for all
three engines, GTK1, GTK2 and QT. A few can be found on KDE-look.org.

1a. emerge =x11-themes/gtk-theme-switch-1.0.1-r2 (specifically the 1.0
version which controls GTK1 themes, rather than the 2.0 version, which
controls GTK2 themes, which you don't need, as you're already doing this
with Kcontrol). If you use any GTK1 apps (sylpheed, gnotepad +,
multi-gnome-terminal, etc), this program can be useful for setting their
theme and fonts.

2. Try to stick to programs for one desktop environment wherever
possible. Yes, this sucks, but until KDE and GNOME (GTK) are a lot more
interoperable in this respect than they are now, the easiest way to
avoid them conflicting is to not bring them into conflict by using
programs from multiple DEs if it can be avoided. This is, btw, why I
complain that KDE is the problem; I don't run GNOME or KDE, but Openbox
and FVWM. I run mostly GNOME (GTK) apps, but there are a couple of KDE
apps I like that I use (k3b, krusader). It's hard not to notice that
when I open one of the KDE programs on my desktop which is already
running a bunch of GTK apps, *the font size changes for everything*.
Just a little, but I can see it. This may have been my mistake though--
I had set kcontrol to 'use my KDE fonts for GTK apps' (using
gtk-engines-qt). It's quite possible that, since kcontrol is not running
until I open Krusader or K3b, and because my KDE font size setting is
not quite the same as my GNOME font size setting (because I just can't
deal with hopping back and forth between two control centers every time
I want to change fonts across the entire system), that when kcontrol
necessarily opens to control the KDE application, it changes the fonts
of all the GTK apps to the specified size (the KDE size). The situation
is the same but mirror-imaged for you; if you run KDE, then open a
GNOME/GTK app, the various GNOME backend programs (notably
/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon) are opened to control the
'look-and-feel' of the GTK app, overriding the KDE settings (unless
you're using gtk-engines-qt, which 'pre-overrides' the
override by GNOME). I've changed the setting in Kcontrol to 'use a
specific font size' (which is the size set by GNOME), so hopefully that
will fix it. In the past, I've just opened up the GNOME control panel or
gtk-theme-switch to 'fix' the GTK apps. But either way, you can see it's
just all an unnecessary annoyance for the user/administrator in the
first place-- and the reason is because these DEs conform to their own
standards, which are fairly incompatible with each other (until they
both finish their migration to the freedesktop.org standard).

Since the point of KDE is that it has a sh*tload of apps for everything
you could possibly want to do ever that are all designed to work with
KDE, it's even easier to just try to stick with apps designed for your
desktop than it is under GNOME (though GNOME has started to get a few
good programs lately-- graveman and gnomebaker are quite nice, though
not quite K3b, and nothing comes close to Krusader, despite Krusader's
lack of interoperability with the GNOME desktop-- so, fortunately the
gap is definitely closing. I'm hoping that GNOME 2.12 will be a
significant step forward in this respect).

Anyway, once you've got that out of the way, you can then deal with your
video settings (if they still need to be dealt with) in what are
hopefully less murky waters.

Hope this helps.
Holly
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