Two Mysteries

[jlowell]

There are two questions I have had about mozilla that I've never been able to answer. There is a large and experienced enough user community at Gentoo that there just might be someone here that can help. Here are the questions:

1. I use fluxbox as my window manager. In attempting to transition from mozilla 1.3.1 to 1.4, I noticed a decided difference in the way fonts appeared on the mozilla interface. The 1.4 fonts were much smaller, virtually unreadable. Over time, I learned that the only satisfactory way to deal with the 1.4 fonts was to edit userChrome.css. I've taken this step and have been able to increase the size of the menu, toolbar, and url fonts so they are identical to what appeared naturally in 1.3. The popup dialog boxes, their size and their fonts remain unaffected, however. I don't know how to identify the popup dialog boxes in userChrome.css to change these settings. Can anyone tell me how to identify these items?

2. Given the above, can anyone explain what it is about the difference between versions 1.3.1 and 1.4 that would make any of this userChrome.css business necessary anyway. Things were right sized in 1.3.1. and, I might add, in 1.4 too when a full-scale desktop environment is used, say xfce4. But when a window manager alone is being used, the 1.4 menu, toolbar, and urlbar fonts are too small. Why this difference; it seems senseless to me?

jlowell

[shm]

[jlowell]

shm,

Nice to hear from you.

Just in the last day or so I've come across a fix for this problem - and an answer to one of the mysteries - that is a far better one and more thorough-going than what you can manage simply by editing userChome.css, a fix which omits the the pop-up dialog boxes anyway. I have little doubt that any number of *box users here will find a happy resolution of their tiny toolbar and menu font problems in mozilla 1.4 by placing these lines at the very beginning of ~/.xinitrc:

xrdb -merge - <<EOF
Xft.dbi: 84
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.hintstyle: hintmedium
EOF

This change fixes everything. If the Xft.dbi: 84 entry is found unsatisfactory, it can be changed to 96 or 72; that part of things is a matter of personal taste.

Now I think it's important to emphasize that you're not likely to have a problem like this if you're running a full DE. Since Gnome and KDE set dpi automatically and Mozilla 1.4 uses xft to set its fonts, this problem is almost certainly a problem of WM users. Mozilla 1.3.1 would not seemed to have relied on the desktop to set dpi.

Now I can emerge Firebird or Mozilla 1.4 without concern. Interestingly, I raised these same questions on the Mozilla forum and got no answer. Thanks for taking the time to post yours.

jlowell