Re: gtk3 (GtkTextView) and MacOS

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2015, Roger Davis wrote:

> Thanks, Jim, your hint on setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME led me to a bunch of other 
> useful info on the web that I have been slogging through all morning now. I 
> have had some success but am still far from the finish line.
>
> On my Mac, if I set XDG_CONFIG_HOME to /opt/local/share/themes/HighContrast, 
> which is where MacPorts dumped the
> HighContrast theme, and which contains a gtk-3.0 subdirectory with the files 
> gtk.css, gtk.gresource and settings.ini, my app successfully loads the 
> HighContrast theme, although I still have the same font problems within my 
> GtkTextView windows.
>
> Similarly, I can make my own settings.ini file in ~/gtksettings/gtk-3.0, set 
> XDG_CONFIG_HOME to ~/gtksettings, and my app processes that file, but again 
> with the same font issues. That file contains a line of the form
>
>   gtk-font-name = fontname fontsize
>
> e.g.,
>
>   gtk-font-name = Sans 10
>
> and I can tweak the fontsize value and successfully get the altered font size 
> in my app. However, absolutely nothing that I do to the fontname results in 
> the use of a different font. In fact,
>
>   gtk-font-name = FontConfusion 10
>
> still loads exactly the same font!
>
> So, I am now convinced this is some kind of font installation or 
> configuration problem. I am guessing that my MacOS gtk3 can't find any fonts 
> whatsoever except for this exceptionally unintelligent fallback font it seems 
> to be using. Does anyone know where gtk3 is looking for its fonts?

I can't claim to offer anything definitive but the hints are: 
fontconfig and fc-cache. Fontconfig should be responsible for 
providing font information to gtk + pango, and fc-cache is the 
program that establishes the cache on which fontconfig draws. You 
might try doing "sudo fc-cache" and see if that makes any difference 
to subsequent runs of your gtk program on OS X.

--
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University