fonts: what is a "point" in Linux/Gnome?

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter Alcibiades wrote:

> This is really puzzling.  The thing I do see is that Rev's IDE on Linux is
> grotesquely small, and the dictionary font is grotesquely small.  I'm really
> surprised in this age of political correctness that Rev considers it
> acceptable because it must be simply unusable by a substantial minority of
> the population.
>
> But I can't see that my desktop icons or panels or any other UI elements are
> materially different in size from the way they are in Windows.  And if they
> are, you just resize them, surely?

It's not quite so simple as that if your goal is to make one layout that 
works well on all supported platforms, as I'll explain more below.

> But as to the fonts, I fired up Rev, created a stack with a field in it,
> then put the font size to 12, and opened up OpenOffice and did the same
> thing.  Its true.  Rev looks like its about 6 point, and OO looks normal 12
> point.  After you find one of the few fonts they will both display!
>
> So which is wrong?  The answer surely must be Rev.  All other applications
> on Linux work just fine and display the fonts in the same way.  Rev is doing
> something unaccountably different.
>
> Its exactly the same as which fonts they display.  All the other apps find
> the same fonts.  Its exactly the same as desktops, all the other apps allow
> them to be used.
>
> Its not Linux.  Its not even Gnome, because it doesn't matter which window
> manager you use.  Its Rev.  Its got to be fixed.

I'm not sure it's so easy to dismiss Rev as the culprit here.  Nor may 
it be so simple to just say "Gnome is wrong!" either.  It may be 
something more complex.

I took a minute this morning to take some screen shots of Rev and OS 
controls on Ubuntu/Gnome, Win XP, and OS X:

<http://fourthworldlabs.com/revfonts/>

You'll note that on those shots Rev's understanding of text size seems 
to match that of Firefox almost perfectly, even as both Win and Linux 
report very different sizes for their OS controls.

My closing observation there sums up the more significant problem:

     Even with the disparity of reported rendered textSize, it's
     possible to make layouts that substantially conform to OS
     standards rather easily for Mac and Win, and the text and
     control sizes of each are close enough that a single layout
     will work well on both platforms.

     Ubuntu/Gnome, however, uses control and text size so far out
     of proportion to other OS standards that they require either
     delivering layouts sized smaller than the user sees in other
     apps on that OS, or making a separate set of layouts specifically
     for that OS.

It's been a while since I've maintained Linux distros here other than 
Ubuntu/Gnome, so it would be interesting to learn if this vastly 
disproportionate default control size is unique to Ubuntu or to Gnome.

I would imagine that KDE, with it's tendency to mimic the Win look and 
feel to some degree, may have control sizes more in keeping with other 
common OS norms.

But it would be interesting to find other Gnome-based distros which have 
control sizes that more closely fit those on Win and Mac.

FWIW, if I recall correctly the Gnome control sizes I see in Ubuntu are 
roughly the same as I used to see in Motif and Irix.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv