Changing font size prevents updates to window

[Mike South <msouth gmail com>]

Hi,

I am using GTK2 in an embedded application.  I have a file "gtk_style" with several entries.  The one I'm asking about looks like this:

style "run_screen"
{
    font_name = "Arial 110"

}

I don't know where we got the "110" value.  I have a client using the application (which operates in fullscreen mode) on a much bigger monitor than what I use/test with.  Client is noting how much real estate is blank.  I was going to do a quick fix here and just increase the font size to address it.

To make it roughly 50% bigger I picked "Arial 160".  When I tested this on my laptop (a 13" macbook air), it was able to render the screen, and the fonts were bigger (enough that some labels were starting to touch/overlap).  But then all updates to the screen failed. (I pushed buttons on the keyboard that should have caused the labels being displayed to change values, and they did not.  I know the code was getting the button presses due to debugging output going to a log.)

I tried other, smaller numbers and eventually found that "Arial 159" does not manifest this problem.  This may be near the threshold where labels on the left side of the screen begin to collide with labels on the right side, but I have no idea if that is related.

I am guessing that I am asking a profoundly stupid question here, and I apologize in advance for that.  But there are no error messages or anything, it just quits updating the screen at all.  For some values of font size I was able to get it to update a few times but then it stopped (not sure if it was a consistent count of updates or amount of time...a few seconds, less than 10 I would say).

I am completely mystified.  As far as I remember, we arrived at the "Arial 110" value by trial and error until it "looked right" on the screens we were testing on.

Anyone have a clue what I might be running into here?  I'm at a complete loss

Thanks for even reading this far,

mike