[Pidgin] #494: Some funny font stuff

[Pidgin]

#494: Some funny font stuff
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  Reporter:  stupac2       |       Owner:  MarkDoliner
      Type:  defect        |      Status:  new        
  Priority:  minor         |   Milestone:  2.0.2      
 Component:  pidgin (gtk)  |     Version:  2.0        
Resolution:                |    Keywords:             
   Pending:  0             |  
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Comment (by kstange):

 This is is a discussion that has been had before.  The reason is because
 Pidgin assumes the conversation's default font size should be the same as
 the default GTK font size.  This is typically around 8 or 9 points on most
 systems.  While Windows AIM uses the same system font size for menus,
 dialogs, etc, the conversation font defaults to 12 points.  When you send
 a message at "normal" size, the AIM users sees it much larger, unless they
 choose to "zoom down" their text.

 I would perceive this as a defect in the official IM clients' design,
 because really, we're doing things the way they should be.  There are
 several workarounds for this, and I'm not sure this is really a valid bug:

 - Edit your .gtkrc-2.0 file as demonstrated in the doc/gtkrc-2.0 file in
 the source distribution
 - Load the gtkrc plugin and set a custom font size for conversations
 - Download and load the pidgin extended preferences plugin from gaim-
 extprefs.sf.net

 If your font size is too small to read, your GTK+ theme is most likely
 badly configured.  If you are running at a smaller than default font size,
 you should know that the reason the font size is showing up too large for
 others is because of poor design on the official client.  Instead, if you
 leave your font size at the default, and suggest your friends use Pidgin
 or set the zoom in the official client to 75%, the fonts won't look so big
 on their screen.  However, some official client users lower their font
 sizes in order to make them more reasonable (because of the aforementioned
 poor design), and educating them of this issue, or using one of the three
 solutions above, should be sufficient to work around this problem.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/494#comment:11>
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