[LAD] Setting fonts in pixels rather than points

[Ralf Mardorf]

Arnold Krille wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Saturday 26 December 2009 15:31:10 Jens M Andreasen wrote:
>   
>> I am trying to fix the size of my UI to be independent of the selected
>> WM theme. I have a gtkrc (based on the "Ia Oya" engine) which will do
>> that - except for the font sizes which will vary dependent on how screen
>> resolution is set globally.
>>
>> One work-around I have found is to use a font that has only one size. Of
>> that kind I have found three: "Terminal" (medium sized, looks a bit like
>> a flattened "9x15"), "Teletext" (like "Terminal" but wider),
>> "Outcast" (small, "Tek"-like slanted) and "Caption" which is again like
>> "Terminal but twice the size and more polished.
>>
>> Are these fonts standard in any distribution? Or a result of the
>> dependencies of whatever packages I might whimsically have happened to
>> have currently installed?
>>
>> [Dots per inch makes little sense when the target could be a cinema
>> sized 800x600 projector as well as a handheld with similar resolution]
>>     
>
> Please use the fonts the user has selected in the sizes the user has selected. 
> There is a reason why some people use 9px Times and others use 20pt bold 
> Verdana. [*] And an applications programmer trying to be smarter than the user 
> ends destroying the users experience...
>
> Arnold
>
> [*] And there is a reason why modern toolkits have dynamic layouts and such 
> stuff.

Full ACK, but it's also good if a user has the possibility to us an 
application specific font, as an additional option. My user selected 
fonts for the DE are huge, but sometimes I like to have smaller fonts 
for some applications. Anyway, for the default the fonts should be the 
fonts selected for the DE and the applications window should be able to 
display even huge fonts. Btw. scrollbars are better than wide and huge 
windows that sometimes can't be moved to show everything.
I can imagine that a coder starting a project has better things to do, 
but keeping an eye on those issue, but for well-engineered applications 
conversion to the DE, applying fonts, using scroll bars and applying 
colours is very important (sometimes there's a dark theme vs bright 
theme issue).