When the first gtk2 applications came, I saw people in this list complain about a tiny menu & dialog font in these apps (evolution, gftp, mozilla, to name a few). This was the case in 8.2, 9.0, ...9.1? Don't know about 9.2, since I'm still happily running everything I need in 8.2. In Gnome, this font can be adjusted in Gnome Control Center. Outside Gnome, the suggested solution was to adjust the font by running gnome-control-center (as user) and keep gnome-settings-daemon running in the background. The reason why I did not like gnome-settings-daemon very much is because of a steady flow of error messages that could be noticed if run from the command line. Also, I noticed a slowdown in the scrolling in several apps, using the arrows in the scroll bar or the arrow keys. I now happened to stumble across a better solution, namely: Add a line like this to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (or create the file if it doesn't exist yet): gtk-font-name = "Adobe Helvetica 12" Apparently, the font name should match the name found in the Gnome Control Center or the KDE Control Center. E.g., if I enter this line instead: gtk-font-name = "Helvetica 12" then the 12 is recognized, but Helvetica is not. gtk2 menu and dialog fonts now look great without gnome-settings-daemon, and scrolling is at optimal speed again. BTW, I got this from the Sylpheed mailing list, from someone who is.... following the gtk mailing list. Sylpheed is making a move from gtk to gtk2 at the moment. S.H.