Theme with smaller font and image sizes

[Stewart Adam]

Hi,

One thing that's always bothered me about GTK is how large GTK widgets
are - especially the Combobox. I played around with my fonts sizes and
while the height of the Combobox is still pretty high when you compare
the hight of the text it holds, smaller font sizes did help. I came
across a fairly old page on the web (forgot the link, sorry) that
explained how Linux traditionally used 10pt font sizes, 75 dpi. Windows
used font size of 8pt and 96dpi. However now that Linux uses 96dpi (and
has for a while), the fonts appear to be much larger. Do you think we
should provide a theme that reduces the stock image sizes by a bit and
uses 8pt fonts? 

I'm not a great theme designer, but I created a basic gtkrc file similar
to the "wimp" gtk theme on Windows. This helped considerably with
"screen real estate", as almost every widget got smaller. I'm not
suggesting this because Mac has their OS's themed this way, but rather
because I find in the default theme there's a lot of potential screen
real estate that goes to waste. Since the font size does affect spacing
but makes the widgets smaller it made all programs much easier to
navigate through!

So, what are you thoughts/opinions? I'd be happy to create and package a
theme that does what I've mentioned above providing somebody could help
me out a little along the way for gtkrc and maybe the theme engine a
bit. This is just an idea, feedback, flames, criticisms are all welcome.

Stewart