Ugly default Tk font on Mac OS

-----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1.8.4 ( I'm not a user and I see this is out-of-date) , I get: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

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

David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA