F11 for XO1 - Fonts

[Mikus Grinbergs]

Comments from an user:

I'm perfectly content to *modify* settings myself, to achieve what I 
consider a readable screen.  What gets me worked up is that I __do 
not know__ where all those settings are, nor *which* setting affects 
which significant portion of what I am looking at.  So please, in 
your discussions, explicitly __mention__ the particular settings you 
know about.

[ BTW, I consider my eyes to be "weak".  Therefore I run (if I know 
how) every screen on every machine (including Linux) with larger 
text than what developers had in mind.  The principal disadvantage 
to this is that all too often the software sets up too small an 
screen area to hold the complete text, if that text is over-sized. ]


The discussion of this topic has mainly addressed Sugar.  There are 
three principal areas of Sugar font usage that interest me:

   *  The text size shown within an Activity-drawn screen.  The
      Activity I use the most is Terminal.  For it, I manually set
      the font size by modifying ~/.sugar/default/terminalrc.  It is
      likely that I would want to change other Activities' font sizes
      as well, if I started to use those Activities more.

   *  The text size used by Sugar for the drop-down palettes in Home
      View.  On some builds, I have been able to influence this in
      /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/sugar/graphics/style.py.

      I seem to recall that on some builds, this change also affected
      the font size used for entries in Journal View -- but then
      again, I seem to recall other builds in which changing style.py
      didn't change the font size used by Journal.  It would be nice
      if I knew for sure how (independently - e.g., without affecting
      Terminal) to change the font size used by Journal.

   *  There is a third area in which Sugar chooses the font size to
      show - text associated with things in the top edge of the
      screen (e.g., the "search" field in the List panel of Home
      View).  So far, I've just  accepted  whatever Sugar does there.


But there is another complete set of facilities to be considered - 
applications "imported" from Linux.  On cjb's 'rawhide-xo' builds, I 
was able to go into Gnome and modify "appearance settings", some of 
which were picked up by Linux applications launched from Terminal.

My most recent struggle has been with the 'Menu Bar' in (the latest) 
Firefox (launched from Terminal).  This text size on XO (I believe 
defined from the system, not by the application) simply takes up too 
much room.  And I have as yet not found a way to make it smaller.


It would be nice to have "make text larger/smaller" controls.  But 
different text sizes are used by the system in different places -- 
it might require a separate "optional palette entry" for each of 
those places to be able to adjust them all.  [Also, if adjustments 
are allowed, please provide a large range of adjustments.  I hate it 
when "zoom in" supports only two additional text sizes.]


mikus