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

[John Fox]

Dear David,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Winsemius [mailto:dwinsemius at comcast.net]
> Sent: Monday, October 08, 2012 1:54 PM
> To: John Fox
> Cc: 'Milan Bouchet-Valat'; 'r-sig-mac'
> Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac] Ugly default Tk font on Mac OS
> 
> 
> On Oct 8, 2012, at 10:26 AM, John Fox wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Just as a point of reference. With a recently installed update to Snow
> Leopard (yes, I'm way behind that adoption curve) and Rcmdr version
> 1.8.4 ( I'm not a user and I see this is out-of-date) , I get:
> 
> > tkfont.actual("RcmdrDefaultFont")
> <Tcl> -family {Bitstream Vera Sans} -size 12 -weight normal -slant roman
> -underline 0 -overstrike 0

Thanks for this -- it's helpful, though (as you note), the current CRAN
version of the Rcmdr is 1.9-1. The development version, 1.9-2 on R-Forge,
has a number of cosmetic improvements, but not a change to font-handling.

Best,
 John

> 
> >
> 
> > 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > R-SIG-Mac mailing list
> > R-SIG-Mac at r-project.org
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
> 
> David Winsemius, MD
> Alameda, CA, USA