Purpose: to describe the alternatives one has in specifying fonts
in wish widgets.


In June, 1999, Markus Pietrek wrote on news:comp.lang.tcl :

"... changing the font of the window widget (which is done with <widgetpath>
configure -font "Helvetica 10")
is not enough, because you have to do it for each (child) widget.

So use the option database. In the wish program, write at the very beginning

 option add *font "Helvetica 10"

(or whatever font you want).

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An alternative to users hard coding fonts in scripts is to write the
tk code to read resources in from files.  For instance, one can use
the Tk '''option''' command to read a resource file.  See
http://www.purl.org/NET/Tcl-FAQ/part5.html for pointers to
Tk code to assist in writing applications which appear to use resources
like other X applications.

As far as I [Larry Virden] know, no one has written a Tk package that works in a
cross platform manner for this type of thing.

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Be sure to see [Practical Guide to Choosing Fonts] here on Wiki as well.
----
If you're going to use the option database, my option tutorial [http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/tcl/option-tutorial.html] is very useful reading. '''DKF'''









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[Eric Brunel] offered this sage counsel in the midst of a
c.l.t thread:
"... -font {-size 10.0}


Try: ... -font {-size -10}

We've had the same kind of problems on a cross-platform application and it
was the solution. In theory, a positive font size should be what you want:
it is supposed to be adjusted according to the screen resolution to look
the same on each platform. In practice, the result is a huge font on
Windows, a normal font on Solaris and a super-tiny font on Linux.
Specifying a negative font size set it in screen points, whatever the
screen resolution is. It should be worse, but it actually felt better for
us: the font looked the same on all platforms."