I think I might be able to help narrow this down a little bit more but probably not worth it, I do not think that anyone is going to be interested in working on something like this, but I will still share some information that I came across while looking into this.
I looked into the text file that Paul mentioned “clearlooks.rc” that can allow user to change font sizes.
Paul mentioned to look for “_text” but everything in this file seems to have this keyword, if any other users try this in the future I would search for keyword “font_name” to find font sizes to change.
Took me a while but I figured out that the following was the text used in toolbar buttons
style “medium_text”
{
font_name = " 8"
}
Everything I mention below this I am basing on this “medium_text” item achieving the same thing as the gtk item that Robin mentioned is possibly now broken, so if this is not true then might not be worth reading.
This “medium_text” item changes the font sizes in the main toolbar which also changes size of buttons.
Now that Ardour uses its own GTK2 based toolkit, if this issue is worked on, I would probably remove the connection to buttons changing in size based on the desktop environments global font size, I would not fix it to adjust font size.
Reason why I say this is because now user cannot access GTK2 to override this from happening if they do not want DE global font size to change Ardour.
To give an example, if user decides to use a font size of 12 in their DE, if that “broken” GTK code in Ardour is fixed and the font sizes do change, this causes many issues in Ardour.
This “medium_text” is linked to many items in Ardour which is unfortunate because do not really want to increase the size of all these items at once. Would be nice to be able to choose the font size per item.
FONT LINKED TO…
Menu Bar
Menu Bar - Drop downs
Context Menus
Main Toolbar ******
Dialogs
Editor Toolbar
Editor Tracks
Side Bar
Mixer Side Bar
Mixer Buttons
etc.
A font size of 12 causes many graphical issues / overlapping.
It also causes an issue where Ardour no longer loads up properly maximized, height wise.
The “Comments” button at bottom of the “Editor Mixer” side bar is off screen at bottom, you have to hit maximize again which fixes it, have to do this each time you open up Ardour.
Setting “medium_text” Font size of 10 is the largest you can go without these issues occurring.
Unfortunately even with font size 10 you get some overlapping of fonts height wise in the section above tracks
Tempo
Time Signature
etc.
These are just some things that would need to be considered if interested, but probably are not.
Anyways, I think I will stop here