Desktop environment font size increases button size

#1

Linux Debian based distro
GTK based Desktop Environment
Ardour 8.6

Most desktop environments come with a basic global setting for font sizes.
I believe most desktop environments use a default font size of about 10
I typically increase this to 12

I notice that when you do this that all the main toolbar buttons in Ardour increase in size. The fonts inside the buttons do not change because Ardour fonts do not work this way, but strange that the buttons do increase in size.

I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to prevent this from happening?
I think I would know how to fix this in my DE using CSS, if Ardour used GTK3, but from what I understand Ardour now uses its own modified version of GTK2.

While on the subject, what if user did want to increase font sizes?
Am I correct in saying that Ardour only allows this to occur by scaling its entire GUI (setting found in preferences)?

Thank You

#2

Ardour uses a mixture of our own buttons and GTK buttons.

The former will ignore any and all desktop settings. The latter will not.

You are mostly correct in your last point. However, the etc/ folder of an ardour.org install contains a file called clearlooks.rc which contains definition of all our “own” font sizes. You could edit that file (it is just text). Look for “_text”

#3

Actually, I retract part of my comment. If you use an Ardour build from ardour.org, even the GTK buttons will completely ignore your system settings too. We disable loading of system-wide or even per-use GTK/system theme files. They may be appropriate for “desktop productivity tools”, but not for a DAW.

I suspect you are using a distro build, and that your distro does not do this in their packaging.

#4

@paul
Hey Paul, thank you for the response.
I do not think anything is going to come out of this post but I will explain a little bit more.
First off, I didn’t know about that text file you mentioned that sounds like it could be useful because I might want to increase font size in Ardour in the future, thank you for mentioning. I didn’t try it yet but I am not sure that that would shrink the button rectangles themselves, which is the issue I am having.

I tested this out in the 8.6.0 official demo.
Anyone interested can overexaggerate this by making your desktop environment global font to something like 18 height.
By doing this you will (hopefully) see that ALL the buttons (rectangles) in Ardours main toolbar at the top become huge, text stays the same (which is fine, issue is the buttons themselves).

I want to be able to adjust/keep the global font size I set in my desktop environment, but do not want that DE font size setting to have any affect on my Ardour main toolbar. No point in increasing the size of the buttons if the text stays the same anyways.

Other buttons do not appear to increase in size. Buttons like the ones in the toolbar above tracks and also dialog box buttons.
So Paul this appears that maybe your first response was correct?
That some buttons are GTK and some are internal.

Would anyone else be willing to confirm that this happens on their system as well?

Thank You

#5

This is intentional. Ardour’s scaling is relative to the desktop’s font-size. I added support for this years ago (around Ardour 3.5ish).

The idea behind this is that, if you require a large font on the desktop (e.g. HiDPI display or a distant screen), Arodur should follow suit and also scale up. In the past Ardour also used the desktop’s default font for everything (I like serif fonts).

While binaries from ardour.org will not parse gtkrc config, certain information about screen scaling and size is still passed via XAtom properties.

#6

I stand corrected, sir. Genuinely did not know that we did that. OTOH, seems a bit weird to go to those lengths and not have it affect all text, no?

#7

I would expect it to affect text. Maybe that broke at some point.

#8

Hey guys, thank you for the responses.
Yeah that is one of the points I was mentioning, the buttons are taking up more space but not really accomplishing anything.

The other desires I mentioned are probably more specific to me so doubtful that they will be added, but I will just mention a couple things. With other applications user can use GTK CSS or QT QSS to be able to modifiy things like font sizes, allowing user to override things such as desktop environment global font sizes.
I know you guys are busy working on other things, but if this does get looked at in the future, I wonder if the fixes for the button issue could be in some way combined with the text file Paul mentioned that allows users to change font sizes within Ardour, if this makes sense.

Anyways, thank you guys again for your responses.

#9

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

#10

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