[PD] font issues - once again ...

[Roman Haefeli]

On Tue, 2019-09-10 at 20:43 +0200, oliver wrote:
> hi, did some more testing on LINUX and it really seems that UBUNTU
> is 
> the problem here.
> 
> i did a fresh install of UBUNTU 19.04 and DEBIAN 10 on my machine.
> both 
> with XFCE as desktop and nothing else but PD 0.49.3 installed via 
> "apt-get install"
> 
> the font rendering difference is huge (see attachment or here)
> 
> https://wolke.klingt.org/index.php/s/VRoJ3e6xTpsoKOD
> 
> as you can see, in both situations, the same settings are used and
> the 
> same fonts are loaded at startup. yet in UBUNTU the spacing between 
> characters is much larger (also in PD's console window) than in
> DEBIAN.

Are you by chance using a HiDPI screen?

Two laptops both having Ubuntu 18.04 installed show different results
here (both Pd 0.50.0; Tk 8.6.8).

The rendering of your test patch looks similar to your Debian Buster
version on my box that has a 15" 1680x1050px monitor. My other box with
a 14" 2560x1440px monitor displays the test patch exactly like your
Ubuntu 19.04 version. 

I got annoyed by this, too, over a year ago, but found a work-around by
manually setting the tk scaling to 1.7 in pd-gui.tcl:289. With that
value, the rendering of your test patch on my HiDPI box looks exactly
the same as your Debian Buster version. 

I somewhat got tired from nagging about this issue, especially since I
don't feel enabled to help in any way. Those font rendering issues seem
really confusing, complicated, and hard to tackle, but they still
bother me, because it is not only a matter of appearance, but sometimes
even of functionality. 

It appears that the HiDPI detection affects the font size in the menu
and the font size in the labels of iemguis, but not "patcher" font in
objects and messages. However, changing 'tk scaling' in pd-gui.tcl
affects _only_ font size in iemgui labels, but not of menus. Patcher
font seems "immune" against any environmental influences (which is
good), but iemgui label font seems not. I don't care about the menu, it
actually makes sense to scale it according to resolution so that
appeared size stays the same. 

Roman



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