On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Peter D Drummond wrote:
> Hi -
Hi Peter
> have a probably trivial problem, but serious if your eyesight
> is not 100% (like mine). Just installed Lyx on a Dell `Big-boy'
> M40 laptop with 1600*1200 screen (140dpi). The main Lyx window
> handles this just fine.
>
> BUT - if you look at menus, all the Xforms fonts in the menus and
> icons become incredibly tiny - obviously they aren't scaling
> correctly. I can't find any information on how to fix this.
> Same problem with Tc/Tk apps.
The trouble is, XForms is the equivalent of fixed point arithmetic in
an age of floating point arithmetic. It's not as simple as just
setting a larger default font size for the dialog/menu fonts and
expecting xforms to cope -- it won't, it doesn't have the facilities
for this. Some of the dialogs are rigged so they can't be resized
because of another problem with xforms so even if the fonts got bigger
and we re-enabled resizing then the dialogs would probably still get
drawn wrong. That said, the "probably" should be investigated. I
guess I now have a 1,000,001th thing to look into :-)
I suspect something could be rigged up but unless it's *very* simple
time will be better spent getting the rest of the GUI work done. I'll
take another look at how hard it is to switch to fltk while I'm
at it (that's already on the todo list anyway).
> Other KDE (ie, Qt) application programs will scale all the menu
> fonts correctly. Isn't it time we changed over to Qt, guys?
> I mean, forget GUI independence, it would be nice to have Lyx
> on just ONE modern GUI..
GUII is getting very close now Peter. Too close to stop.
Admittedly the last three months or so hasn't seen much change because
the developers involved have been either preoccupied with other work
or have been fixing bugs in preparation for the long overdue 1.2.0pre1
release.
You could start using 1.2.0cvs (pretty stable at present) and compile
with the Qt2 frontend. At least those dialogs that have been
converted will be readable for you. Then you can learn the shortcut
keys for everything else and forget about ever needing the menus
again!
> By the way, I've ordered a high-res M40 for my wife as well, so
> I need to fix this problem before it arrives, otherwise domestic
> disharmony is on the horizon - her eyesight is no better than mine
> for tiny fonts.. ;-)
If she complains, I'll give it good home. ;-)
> Keep up all the good work - and send good vibrations over the
> ether to Allan Rae, who is talking on Lyx tomorrow at the Linux
> conference here in sunny Brisbane, Australia. Hope someone out
> there has a cool idea on this.
The seminar went pretty well and is available on the web at:
http://www.devel.lyx.org/~rae/
Allan. (ARRae)
