Today I was doing some long-overdue housekeeping and upgraded Inkscape to 0.46 (from 0.45, I believe) and OS X's X11.app to 2.3.2.1 (from 1.something, unfortunately I don't remember the exact version). I shouldn't have upgraded both at the same time, because now I can't pinpoint exactly where my trouble is...

Inkscape seems to work and has some nice improvements like I expected to see with an upgrade. Unfortunately, the UI text is huge now! Menus, dialogs, tooltips, all of it about 30% larger than I think it should be. Screenshot below.



I'm running it on a MacBook at 1280x800 resolution. In the older version, the window fit comfortably on my screen, stopping just above my OS X dock. Now you can see how the larger text forces the window to be taller, placing the bottommost items under the dock, where I can't click them without launching apps. Since I took the screenshot, I made the menu icons smaller, which doesn't solve my big-text problem but at least lets me scale the window to fit onscreen. I'm using Leopard, by the way, 10.5.6.

Is there any way, either in Inkscape or in X11, to reduce the size of all that huge text? Thanks in advance from a first-time poster.

A little more searching around suggests this is the problem. So it seems it's not an Inkscape issue after all. Have any of the Mac users here encountered the same thing?

Last post, sorry for having this little conversation with myself... but I found the answer and I figured I'd post it here in case anyone else comes across this thread in their quest for the the same solution. I hate to find questions asked on forums that never got the closure they deserved.

The answer, as found on the XQuartz site, is as follows:

Edit /usr/X11/bin/startx and edit the defaultserverargs line...


I did not have write privileges for that file but sudo did the trick. Hope this helps!

uselessness wrote: I hate to find questions asked on forums that never got the closure they deserved.

I do also. Thanks for taking the time to supply the answer to your problem.

One more thing, I got into an e-mail discussion with another Inkscape user who had this same issue. He told me that though my solution works, it's not the "right" way to do it. The "right" way is a bit more involved, but addresses the issue at the application level instead of at the window manager level. Here is our correspondence, posted with his permission:

Marco wrote:

Have a look at this message and all the related thread on the x11-users mailing list:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2009/Jan/msg00078.html

In short, XQuartz developers say the DPI setting is now ok and any wrong font size in the GUI is due to bugs in the GUI toolkit (which the applications use to draw window elements). I don't know who's right, but in the end I worked around the problem by finding various configuration files where GUI fonts for Gimp and Inkscape are defined, and editing them. The ones for Gimp are listed in the message above, while the one for Inkscape is here (from the same thread):
http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2009/Jan/msg00091.html

uselessness wrote:

Digging around on my own, I found a line in an XQuartz config file for changing the default DPI setting. I edited /usr/X11/bin/startx and set defaultserverargs="-dpi 72". This one setting fixed both Inkscape and the GIMP for me -- everything looks correct in both UIs now. I wonder which is the "right" way to do it, if modifying X11 directly is more or less dangerous than modifying the application support files individually... I'd hate to break anything next time I upgrade.

Marco wrote:

Er... no danger anyway, they're just configuration files after all, the only annoyance will be that you have to edit it again when installing a new version (of X11 for you, of Gimp and Inkscape in my case).

But the point is that, according to XQuartz developers, you're fixing the wrong side. And doing it the wrong way.

First of all, regarding the way: XQuartz now allows setting the DPI into its standard preference file, you just have to do like this message tells in the same thread I previously mentioned:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2009/Jan/msg00016.html

In your case it would be:

Code: Select all

defaults write org.x.X11 dpi -int 72

But then, even though setting this to around 89 seemed to give the right size here on my MacBook, the developers say that I should instead set it to 112, which is the real DPI of my 13" MacBook screen, and then change the fonts in the applications and GUI toolkits to my likings, and this is what I did in the end. I have to admit this also gives me more configuration freedom, because when fixing font size in the menus some other fonts in the GUI looked a bit too small, while I can configure them separately now.

I'm a designer and a Mac guy... sorting through X11 config issues is a bit foreign to me. So I hope this info is as helpful for you as it was for me!