Re: gtk3 (GtkTextView) and MacOS

[Roger Davis <rbd soest hawaii edu>]

Wow, here's a shocker, to my own stupid self at least -- it appears that 
gtk3 is tied into the native MacOS font system!

Thanks for the tip on fontconfig/fc-cache, Allin. Once I looked into this 
it became apparent that fontconfig had known all along about all kinds of 
fonts, but none of the ones listed by fc-list which I had already tried 
were usable from my settings.ini file. Eventually, however, I tried 
'Courier' which worked to my great surprise. I then tried to figure out 
what was special about Courier, and having noticed that the system process 
list showed

1330  9108     1   0  9:12AM ??         0:06.92 
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/ATS.framework/Support/fontd

I opened up my MacOS Terminal preferences on a lark to see what fonts 
MacOS was making available. Courier, check. Copperplate, Monaco, check. 
And they all work in my settings.ini. Youse all have to try this just to 
see a gtk3 dialog panel overflowing with Copperplate. Or not.

It does seem a bit contradictory to me that gtk3 (at least as packaged by 
MacPorts) calls up XQuartz, but then completely ignores the X11 font 
support and goes direct to MacOS. Not a crazy idea, I suppose, but a bit 
surprising, and also not likely to make available all the gtk-related 
fonts you're used to having. I'd be less surprised to see a direct 
gtk-on-Quartz implementation do this.

OK, now to figure out how to add the font I want to MacOS -- how hard 
could that possibly be? ;->

Thanks for your followup, Jim, and for your comments as well, Daniel! 
Regarding the latter, I'd have to say that for what is supposed to be a 
cross-platform GUI, gtk3/gnome3 is abysmally supported on MacOS, which is 
a major platform. I won't say that's anybody's fault, but if the 
philosophy here is that gtk doesn't need to work well on boxes that aren't 
running full-on gnome3, I think that's a prescription for its ultimate 
demise -- a disturbing thought given that I've recently spent almost a 
year porting two decades' worth of Motif code into it.

Thanks all! (And back here in ten minutes after I'm whipped by the MacOS 
font system.)

Roger