[PD] console font size really big

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 31 19:17:43 CET 2014


On 01/30/2014 06:26 PM, Miller Puckette wrote:
> Better than changing the font size globaly would be to change the
> font sizes in tcl/pdwindow.tcl to negative numbers, which has the same
> effect but only locally (instead of nuking everything.  The particular one
> is:
>
>      text .pdwindow.text -relief raised -bd 2 -font {-size 10} \
>          -highlightthickness 0 -borderwidth 1 -relief flat \
>          -yscrollcommand ".pdwindow.scroll set" -width 60 \
>          -undo false -autoseparators false -maxundo 1 -takefocus 0
>
> (change "size 10" to "size -10".)
>
> Now I should think about whether to do that in the Pd source :)

That's a difficult choice.  On the one hand you'll get console output 
with similar sized font on each platform.  (Not pixel-exact btw because 
that depends on the font renderer.)  On the other you'll cause problems 
for the visually impaired who really do want point-sized fonts.

Of course the latter point only holds _if_ tcl/tk reports a sane number 
for [tk scaling].  That's probably not the case for OSX, and who knows 
for various GNU/Linux distros.  But I haven't looked to see whether this 
is remedied in tk 8.6.

Btw, for those exploring other GUI toolkits for Pd: choose QT.  It is as 
cross-platform as anything could be, has an enormous userbase, great 
documentation, and a _friendly_ community.  I cannot stress that last 
point enough.  If someone disagrees please try porting Pd's GUI to GTK; 
after you burn out from trying to deal with Gnome devs I'll buy you a beer.

-Jonathan

>
> cheers
> Miller
>
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 06:25:23PM -0500, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>> On 01/24/2014 05:31 PM, Peter P. wrote:
>>> Johnathan WIlkins wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'd be curious to know what window manager you are using.
>>>>
>>>> Try going into pd-gui.tcl and find the line:
>>>> # tk scaling 1
>>>>
>>>> Remove the "#", save the file, and then restart Pd.  See if that
>>>> solves the problem.
>>>> (Depending on how you are running Pd, you may need to have privileges
>>>> to edit that file)
>>>> -Jonathan
>>> I am using fluxbox.
>>>
>>> Indeed, editing /usr/local/lib/pd/tcl/pd-gui.tcl to yield
>>>      tk scaling 1
>>> solved the problem for me.
>>>
>>> Interestingly there is a file /usr/local/bin/pd-gui.tcl present as
>>> well, whose changes do not have an effet. This Pd is installed using
>>> "make install" from within Miller's git sources. I wonder why
>>> pd-gui.tcl is installed twice on my system, the latter one also being
>>> in my $PATH.
>>>
>>> Thank you again for this quick one Jonathan.
>>>
>>> There is a comment related to tk scaling in this very file just above
>>> the scaling option:
>>>      # we are not using Tk scaling, so fix it to 1 on all platforms.  This
>>>      # guarantees that patches will be pixel-exact on every platform
>>>      # 2013.07.19 msp - trying without this to see what breaks - it's
>>>      # having
>>>      # deleterious effects on dialog window font sizes.
>>>
>>> Would be interesting to know wonder what the deletrious effects were.
>> Tk has a very friendly but very small community without the
>> resources to make sure everything works as advertised across all
>> platforms.  So depending on which platform you use you'll see
>> different symptoms, depending on how well tk is integrated with the
>> guts of the window manager (in GNU/Linux, this would be "not at
>> all"), the accuracy of the info delivered to Tk from the OS/window
>> manager, implementation features/bugs in a particular graphics
>> subsystem, etc.
>>
>> One detail is that if you let [tk scaling] do its thing, you'll see
>> problems in the postscript output if you print a patch.  There's an
>> ugly fix somewhere for this which requires hacking the ps output to
>> scale it by the tk scaling factor.
>>
>> But if you hard code tk scaling to 1 users on Windows will see font
>> problems from Tk's half-baked, hardly documented theming engine that
>> would require _really_ ugly hacks all over Pd to fix.
>>
>> -Jonathan
>>
>>> But, hey- problem solved for me.
>>>
>>> thanks
>>> cheers
>>> P
>>>
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