Setting a font for the verbose cursor(s)

[John Emmas]

There are probably several verbose cursors for all I know but the one I'm thinking of is the one which displays the timeline time when you left-click on Ardour's canvas.  This is giving me a minor (though ugly) problem in my Windows build.

AFAICT the main GTK+ GUI objects (buttons, menus, list boxes etc) seem to use the Pango font rendering engine that's relevant to whichever platform GTK+ was built for.  On my (Windows) platform they use PangoRenderWin32.  On Linux they presumably use PangoRenderX.  However, the verbose cursor seems to be using PangoRenderFc, which manages fonts via FontConfig and Freetype.  By default, these seem to use a different collection of fonts.  At the moment, FontConfig and FreeType seem to be picking an arbitrary font for the verbose cursor (presumably, whichever font was the first to be enumerated).  On Mixbus (OS-X) it's conveniently choosing the same font that's used for the green clocks (on my system, anyway).  On Linux, Ardour is using a serifed font for the verbose cursor text (on my system) whereas the other widgets all have sans-serif fonts.  The serifed font seems to be Times Roman or something like that which looks okay, even though it doesn't match the other fonts.

However, on my Windows build, the chosen font is quite ugly.  I don't know what it is but it looks slightly reminiscent of that computer-style font that was popular in 1970's sci-fi films!  It's readable, but not very pretty.  If there are other verbose canvas cursors they'll probably suffer from the same problem.

Paul (or anyone) could you suggest how and where I could explicitly specify a font to be used for verbose cursor text?  There doesn't seem to be a particular font specified at present, from what I can tell.

John
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[Paul Davis]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 6:54 AM, John Emmas <johne53@...> wrote:

> Paul (or anyone) could you suggest how and where I could explicitly specify a font to be used for verbose cursor text?  There doesn't seem to be a particular font specified at present, from what I can tell.

all fonts are specified in the GTK rc file (ardour2_ui_dark.rc for the
dark theme, ardour2_ui_light.rc for the light theme).

in the meta-file for this (ardour2_ui_dark.rc.in) the font is specified as  

   font_name = "%FONT_BOLD_LARGER%"

the actual font names are specified in the gtk2_ardour SConscript
file, where that particular setting is:

       sans bold 24

there is no reason that it should be a serif'ed font.
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[John Emmas]

Thanks Paul.  As far as you know, is this something that might have stopped working temporarily?  The reason I'm asking is that if I boot up my Mac and change the relevant setting from "Lucida Grande bold 28" to "Lucida 11" I do see the anticipated change when I next launch Mixbus.  However, when I'm running Ardour (under Linux or Windows) changing the entry from "sans bold 24" to "sans 8"  makes no difference at all to the font I see.

John
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[Paul Davis]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 11:59 AM, John Emmas <johne53@...> wrote:
> Thanks Paul.  As far as you know, is this something that might have stopped working temporarily?  The reason I'm asking is that if I boot up my Mac and change the relevant setting from "Lucida Grande bold 28" to "Lucida 11" I do see the anticipated change when I next launch Mixbus.  However, when I'm running Ardour (under Linux or Windows) changing the entry from "sans bold 24" to "sans 8"  makes no difference at all to the font I see.

nothing has changed in a2 in this regard for a long, long time.
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[John Emmas]

On 30 Jan 2011, at 21:15, Paul Davis wrote:

>
> nothing has changed in a2 in this regard for a long, long time.

Thanks Paul.  That's pretty much what I expected.  The information in my files is exactly as you described but I'm definitely not seeing the expected behaviour.  I might try a full rebuild tomorrow and see if that changes anything.  If not, at least I have some ideas now about where to start looking for the problem.

One thing that occurred to me is that the "ardour2_ui_XXX.rc" files for my Windows build were simply copied verbatim from by Linux drive.  So if ardour2_ui_dark.rc was corrupted somehow, I'd expect to see the same problem on Linux and Windows (which I am).  Suppose I select "Restore Defaults" in my Theme Manager.  Will that rebuild the config file for me?

John
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[Paul Davis]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 5:44 PM, John Emmas <johne53@...> wrote:

> One thing that occurred to me is that the "ardour2_ui_XXX.rc" files for my Windows build were simply copied verbatim from by Linux drive.  So if ardour2_ui_dark.rc was corrupted somehow, I'd expect to see the same problem on Linux and Windows (which I am).  Suppose I select "Restore Defaults" in my Theme Manager.  Will that rebuild the config file for me?

no.

the simplest way to get the basic config file back is to (a) remove
any copy from your ~/.ardour2 directory (b) remove it from the build
tree (c) run scons again.

you should probably check the contents of the file too, look for the
word verbose and see what the "font_name" property is set to.

--p
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