Re: Initial font in the GUI terminal window and other font issues

[Michael Goffioul]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 6:56 PM, John Donoghue <address@hidden> wrote:

On 09/24/2013 02:05 PM, address@hidden wrote:

-----------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:52:46 -0400
From: "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden>
To: octave maintainers mailing list <address@hidden>
Subject: Initial font in the GUI terminal window and other font issues
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

I've had reports that the GUI terminal window isn't working properly 
because of the font used.  For example, the text is offset from the 
cursor position or highlighting a text selection doesn't work properly. 
  These problems are happening because some proportional font is used 
instead of a fixed-width font.  This sometimes seems to happen even when 
people are just starting up the GUI for the first time.  How can we 
ensure that an appropriate fixed-width font is used for the terminal? 
Do we need to distribute a suitable default font along with Octave?

Similarly, should we be selecting a particular set of fonts to use by 
default for the GUI menus and other items?  Of course, we should still 
allow users to select the fonts they want to use if they have a 
preference, or allow them to select the "default system fonts".  But I 
think it might be good for us to set our own default set of fonts so 
that the default appearance of Octave is predictable.

Comments?

I'm not sure how to do this properly in Qt.  Does anyone have experience 
or expertise with selecting fonts and setting defaults in Qt?

jwe

I wonder if the issue is due to the default font "Courier New" is not being found?

According to the QFont docs, you can specify font hints which will be used if the requested font isnt found.
font.setStyleHint(QFont::TypeWriter);

http://http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/library/html/qt4/qfont.html#fontmatching

You may be right. Both QWinTerminalImpl and QUnixTerminalImpl define a default font with the QFont::TypeWriter hint, but I think this is always overridden by QTerminal::notice_settings. And notice_settings doesn't set the QFont::TypeWriter hint, so you may end up with a non-monospace font.

Michael.