Default Monospace font in gedit is too big

[Frank Niedermann]

The default Monospace font in gedit is too big in comparison to the other fonts on Breezy RC1.

gedit uses Monospace/12 by default, Gnome uses Monospace/10 by default.

Maybe gedit should be set to "Use default theme font" by default?

Same is for firefox, the Monospace fonts are too big (in the textareas at the Ubuntu wiki for example).

[Frank Niedermann (fbn)]

this screenshot shows the default font size in gedit

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

This screenshot looks quite ok to me. I think this is rather subjective and I'm not inclined to change it. Any suggestions?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is a bugzilla.gnome bug about using the same font as the rest of GNOME by default. Anyway that's an upstream discussion, we don't want to divert on that since that's subjective. I've no issue with the current font for my part

[Frank Niedermann (fbn)]

Daniel,

please compare the Monospace font in gedit ("This font is too big") with the other fonts (gedit menue, gedit tabs, icons, title). The font just doesn't fit into the whole picture.

Gnome's Monospace font size is 10 by default, gedit's is 12 ...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

what is the issue? There is no reason to have the same font for the text content than for the UI ...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that will be fixed upstream for GNOME 2.14

[Matthew East (mdke)]

This is fixed now I think. Closing bug.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

This has reappeared: to summarise the bug, gedit doesn't use the system monospace font by default. You can activate this in the preferences, but I think that it would be a good default to have it use the system monospace font.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Seb, what do you think? Should we set "System font" as a default for gedit?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Daniel, that seems to reasonable choice to me .. what do you think about it?

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

I suggested it - we should go for it! Want me to do the change?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

yeah, go for it ;)

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

This should be fixed with next upload.

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

This bug is still not fixed, actually. It is rather old and is affected by the upstream source code. There is an open bug in the GNOME bugtracker that is still open on this issue—it is the same issue and yet a different one, so I am not sure if a new bug should be opened or not. The reasonable default should be that gedit should use the default system monospace font so that it can be consistent with the profile/theme of the system.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

I just had a chat with the upstream maintainer:
<pbor> we should change it so that 'follow theme font' follows the monospace font (right now follows the normal font which is even worse)
 but even then I feel the the default terminal font is too small to be the default font
<pbor> dholbach: the default font should have a size that fills 80 columns on the default window size

Suddenly I'm not at all convinced to do the change.

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

This doesn’t make any sense. It should simply be the default monospace font. If the default terminal font is too small for a user, than should that not just be adjusted instead, system-wide?

The issue here is that the application does not follow the expected convention. Is this not about usability? Should the applications not follow expected conventions so that they are usable. For that matter, other GNOME software does the same thing—Anjuta, Bluefish, and others—where one has to tweak the settings *for* *each* *application*. This is a usability nightmare!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is a "document font", maybe that one should be used?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

fixed to feisty now