[R-SIG-Mac] Ugly default Tk font on Mac OS

[John Fox]

Dear all,

Milan and I have now corresponded about this issue privately, and it appears that there's a difference in the font used under his Mac OS X system (running Snow Leopard) and mine (running Mountain Lion). I currently get the font

	> tkfont.actual("RcmdrDefaultFont")
	<Tcl> -family {Bitstream Vera Sans} -size 10 -weight normal -slant roman -underline 0 -overstrike 0

which (to my eye) is substantially more attractive than what I get when I hard-code Helvetica:

	<Tcl> -family Helvetica -size 10 -weight normal -slant roman -underline 0 -overstrike 0

I don't know what the source of the difference is -- a different X-windows is used for Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, and Milan and I are in different language locales.

Of course, if there's a way to correct this problem, I'm happy to implement it.

Best,
 John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Milan Bouchet-Valat [mailto:nalimilan at club.fr]
> Sent: Monday, October 08, 2012 4:15 AM
> To: r-sig-mac
> Cc: John Fox
> Subject: Ugly default Tk font on Mac OS
> 
> Hi!
> 
> On Mac OS, since John Fox has removed the code that forced the default
> font to be Helvetica (which is a good idea), Rcommander looks terribly
> ugly (try by yourself ;-). I've reports of this on at least two
> machines, under Snow Leopard.
> 
> I've played a bit with fonts on such machines, and I discovered that the
> problem is not particular to Rcmdr at all, but that it affects all named
> fonts that are created manually.
> 
> Rcommander uses a font created that way:
> .Tcl("font create RcmdrDefaultFont -size X") # with X a given value
> 
> On Mac OS, this command creates a font whose family name is "fixed",
> according to tkfont.actual(), and it is somewhat translated to an ugly
> font. This is weird, because all default Tk fonts, like TkDefaultFont,
> TkTextFont, TkMenuFont... all use "helvetica" as font family, which is a
> reasonable default (and not a fixed font). What might be happening on
> Macs is that system fonts like "systemSystemFont",
> "systemApplicationFont" and friends are _not_ defined correctly, i.e.
> they also use "fixed" as font family. So maybe newly created named fonts
> inherits from them.
> 
> On Linux (and most likely on Windows), the default font family is
> correct when creating a named font.
> 
> 
> Here's a minimal example that reproduces the issue:
> library(tcltk)
> .Tcl("font create test")
> tkfont.actual("test") # Wrong
> tkfont.actual("TkDefaultFont") # OK
> tkfont.actual("systemSystemFont) # Wrong
> etc.
> 
> 
> Regards