Re: gtk3 (GtkTextView) and MacOS

[Roger Davis <rbd soest hawaii edu>]

Hi Jim,

I suspect this may have something to do with how gtk3/gnome3 is built 
and/or configured on the Mac. I have no experience with the jhbuild 
environment and have always used the MacPorts packages, but have never 
made any attempt to dig into how the latter are built. As I said, I was 
quite startled to find that my apps were somehow getting their fonts out 
of the MacOS font system rather than the fontconfig stuff used by most X11 
servers. Perhaps gtk3 has some backdoor directly into the MacOS fonts that 
was enabled by the MacPorts build, or maybe somehow my XQuartz (2.7.7, 
xorg-server 1.15.2) has been built to use those fonts. Might be an 
interesting experiment to play with a non-gtk X11 client's fonts and see 
what happens.

As far as my use of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0/settings.ini, I based this 
strategy on

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html

which reads

"GtkSettings provide a mechanism to share global settings between 
applications. On the X window system, this sharing is realized by an 
XSettings manager that is usually part of the desktop environment, along 
with utilities that let the user change these settings. In the absence of 
an Xsettings manager, GTK+ reads default values for settings from 
settings.ini files in /etc/gtk-3.0, $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/gtk-3.0 and 
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0. These files must be valid key files (see 
GKeyFile), and have a section called Settings. ..."

Maybe the key phrase here is "In the absence of an Xsettings manager", 
i.e., you have one and I don't? Also of interest might be "On the X window 
system", implying that if someone used the direct-to-Quartz gtk backend 
this would not work then, either? It would certainly be nice to discover a 
strategy that worked under all these circumstances. I think that at this 
point I don't actually need my settings.ini file to get proper 
functionality with the default theme (now that my fonts are being 
correctly accessed), but I'm keeping it around mostly so users can alter 
the fontsize since I'm not running full-on gnome3 and there's no 
tweak-tool, etc., available. (I still can't install many of the gnome3 
MacPorts packages because of a MacPorts package bug, and am at any rate 
not enthusiastic about loading up the system with all that weight just to 
run my own gtk app suite.)

You might try changing your font size value in settings.ini just to 
confirm whether that file is being read at all. That had an effect for me 
even when I could not get the font to change (before discovering I was 
trying to use the wrong fonts).

This is a murky swamp indeed!

Roger

> From: Jim Charlton <charltn gmail com>
>
> I tried your font changing solution to alter the font for my gtk3
> application.  I was unable to change the font by putting gtk-font-name
> in settings.ini regardless of where I put that file or the value of the
> environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME... or the actual font name.  I
> found this to be true on both MAC OS X (Yosemite 1010, Gtk3 and Gtkmm3
> built with jhbuild) and on my Linux Ubuntu box.