Appearance of Qt apps messed up by gnome-settings-daemon
Hi, the fonts in gtk2 apps (menus, dialogs, etc.) appear small and hardly readable, unless I have gnome-settings-daemon running. But... menus and dialogs etc. in Qt apps appear extremely large then. If I go to K Control Center > Appearance > Fonts and adjust the menu of, say, Opera to normal, then the menu fonts of Konsole are way too small. Setting this to normal make other menu fonts appear very large. Button text and dialogs in Opera are way too big and can't be changed. These are just a few examples. In short, gnome-setting-daemon messes up the appearance of Qt apps. I ended up _not_ using gnome-settings-daemon any more, and avoiding gtk2 apps wherever possible. The big unsolved mystery is: why do the gnome2 settings affect Qt??? Can it be switched off? S.H.
On Thursday 25 September 2003 8:48 pm, Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
In short, gnome-setting-daemon messes up the appearance of Qt apps. I ended up _not_ using gnome-settings-daemon any more, and avoiding gtk2 apps wherever possible.
The big unsolved mystery is: why do the gnome2 settings affect Qt??? Can it be switched off?
I don't have Gnome installed on this PC as an alternative desktop, but I use Gnome programs. Last week I installed Sodipodi and FrontLine off the SuSE disks, and the fonts in GIMP et al became a large Courier-type thing. Some screensaver stuff also got installed, because I started getting screensavers (some rather nice, it has to be said) instead of a blank screen. So after downloading gLabels and having a look at it, I installed gconf-editor and control-center2 off the SuSE disks. Running CC2 fixed the fonts on Gnome apps, but, as you say, all new KDE apps started then had stupid fonts. Moreover, as before (see my 24 July post), the desktop got taken over. I ran gconf-editor and unticked /desktop/gnome/background/draw-background, as James suggested in his post of 13 September. I logged out and back in again, and Gnome fonts were back to their titchy Courier, while KDE fonts were back to normal, but at least the desktop was OK. I ran CC2 again and adjusted the Gnome fonts, whereupon they looked nice, but KDE fonts were off the wall again (not all of them - Konqueror seemed to be OK, but konsole, and such things as YaST and the kdesu password box had stupidly large fonts). Moreover, just running CC2 seemed to tell gnome-settings-daemon to do its thing, because it gaily took over the desktop again (in spite of the draw-background setting telling it not to!) So the sad conclusion seems to be that GTK2 and QT don't coexist nicely. (It may be that if you have Gnome installed as an alternative desktop, the SuSE install does some magic that sorts that out. I don't know, and for me life is too short to try it out.) The only alternative if you want a decent-looking desktop is never to launch CC2 (which starts the confounded gnome-settings-daemon, which you have to logout to get rid of), and put up with crappy fonts in Gnome apps (which means I, like you, will only use them when I absolutely have to). This seems a bit of an own-goal, really, since for the five years I have been using Linux it was always possible to have apps from Gnome looking reasonable on KDE - no longer, it seems. I conclude from this that Gnome either that needs a bit more work, or that its coders have forgotten how to play nicely :-) -- Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rydd yn Gymraeg
* Kevin Donnelly (kevin@dotmon.com) [030927 11:53]:
So the sad conclusion seems to be that GTK2 and QT don't coexist nicely. (It may be that if you have Gnome installed as an alternative desktop, the SuSE install does some magic that sorts that out. I don't know, and for me life is too short to try it out.) The only alternative if you want a decent-looking desktop is never to launch CC2 (which starts the confounded gnome-settings-daemon, which you have to logout to get rid of), and put up with crappy fonts in Gnome apps (which means I, like you, will only use them when I absolutely have to). This seems a bit of an own-goal, really, since for the five years I have been using Linux it was always possible to have apps from Gnome looking reasonable on KDE - no longer, it seems.
I conclude from this that Gnome either that needs a bit more work, or that its coders have forgotten how to play nicely :-)
I'm not sure why your having such an issue. I use the gnome-settings-daemon to control GTK2 fonts while in KDE and all of my fonts..Gnome2 or KDE look just absolutely kickass. I would think it's a setting somewhere that has been fubared. Give this screenshot a look. You'll see that I have Gaim and Mozilla-Firebird (GTK2 apps) running within KDE. My desktop fonts are just as good as Kmail and Konqueror are. So at least in my case I know that it's possible. I've also replaced every Gnome2 package that came with 8.2 with the usr-local-bin packages or at least all that James has built. http://www.whack.org/~ben/current-desktop.jpg -- Ben Rosenberg ---===---===---===--- mailto:ben@whack.org ----- If two men agree on everything, you can be sure that only one of them is doing the thinking.
On Saturday 27 September 2003 8:01 pm, Ben Rosenberg wrote:
I'm not sure why your having such an issue. I use the gnome-settings-daemon to control GTK2 fonts while in KDE and all of my fonts..Gnome2 or KDE look just absolutely kickass. I would think it's a setting somewhere that has been fubared. Give this screenshot a look. You'll see that I have Gaim and Mozilla-Firebird (GTK2 apps) running within KDE. My desktop fonts are just as good as Kmail and Konqueror are. So at least in my case I know that it's possible. I've also replaced every Gnome2 package that came with 8.2 with the usr-local-bin packages or at least all that James has built.
Well, I don't know either, but others have had the same issue :-) You have a predominantly Gnome desktop, using KDE apps, where mine is the other way around. Maybe KDE fits more nicely into Gnome than Gnome does into KDE (ie accepts its settings rather than trying to impose its own) but as I said, that suggests the Gnome coders have missed something somewhere. It's not a particularly big deal, since all it makes me do is look for a KDE app in preference to a Gnome app, where one exists. I should say that fonts on web-pages in Moz, for instance, are OK - it's the screen furniture that is the problem, which suggests to me that there is indeed some setting that is incorrect, as you say. But I haven't gone and purposely broken a setting, so either Gnome has, or it hasn't set something it should have (or checked that it is set). It doesn't inspire me that it disregards its own gconf settings (eg desktop-background) when these are manually changed .... -- Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rydd yn Gymraeg
In my post of 25 September I mentioned the phenomenon that if I run gnome-settings-daemon to restore the fonts in gtk2 apps, the menu and dialog fonts of most qt apps (Konsole, Quanta, Opera, Yast2, ...) become ridiculously large. To me it was a mystery how the gnome2 settings could affect qt. It was recognized by Kevin Donnelly who said on 27 September:
Running CC2 fixed the fonts on Gnome apps, but, as you say, all new KDE apps started then had stupid fonts. [...] So the sad conclusion seems to be that GTK2 and QT don't coexist nicely. (It may be that if you have Gnome installed as an alterna- tive desktop, the SuSE install does some magic that sorts that out.)
I do have Gnome installed, but that makes no difference. Running qt apps from within Gnome or running gtk2 apps from within KDE or using some window manager makes no difference either. Yet, it looks like I've found a solution. If anti-aliasing in qt is turned off, then things are back to normal. This has to be done in two ways: 1. In KDE: Control Center > Appearance & Themes > Fonts: uncheck "Use anti-aliasing for fonts". 2. As a normal user, run qtconfig Under the 'Fonts' tab, near the bottom, uncheck "Enable Anti-Aliased Font Support (Xft)" It looks like the KDE settings overrule the qtconfig settings in general, but anti-aliasing must be switched off in both. At this point, applications like Yast2, Konsole, Quanta etc. appear with normal fonts again, even when gnome-settings-daemon is running. There is just one qt program that stubbornly behaves the old way: Opera! Installing the 'Qt shared' or 'Qt static' version makes no difference. The 7.11 or 7.20 versions make no difference either. To take this last hurdle, in Opera go to File > Preferences > Fonts. About all the font names you see there end with "(Xft)". Anti-aliasing, again. I replaced all the "Xft" fonts with their non-Xft counterparts. And Opera, too, is back to normal, even while gnome-settings-daemon is running. Only remaining question is why others are not bothered by anti-aliasing. Note that anti-aliasing in qt apps still works fine, even though it is switched off in KDE CC and qtconfig. Looks like it interferes with other settings. Regards, S.H.
participants (3)
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Ben Rosenberg -
Kevin Donnelly -
Sjoerd Hiemstra