pveurshout
August 30th, 2009, 11:02 AM
I've set Jaunty to display fonts with a 9pt size and generally everything works fine, however, every now and then I notice that certain applications suddenly have an extremely large font when I start them for the first time after booting (KMess, Skype: it's about 1.5-2x the size I normally use, see screenshot below) or where the font is messed up in some other way (Firefox: both the application font and font used on websites is wrong, and the letter 'k' doesn't display properly. Somewhat similar to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1169688). This does not affect the window title or anything, only the contents of the window itself.
The font settings in System/Preferences/Appearance do not appear to change while this happens (it keeps showing 9pt, as it should).
Strangely enough:
Other applications (although I haven't tried them all, of course ;)) work perfectly fine while these three are having problems,
Generally, when I close the application and try again a little while later, the problem mysteriously enough has disappeared all by itself (but today it actually took at least 10 minutes),
Sometimes I can go days without experiencing any of this, but then again it can also happen three times in a row. The annoying part is that I can never be sure it'll fix itself if I simply close the application and restart it a couple seconds later (which usually does the trick).
Could this be related to using an application called 'preload', which loads frequently used applications into memory automatically (to speed up launching them)? I don't really know if it makes any sense, but my theory is that KMess, Skype and Firefox are loaded into memory at start-up before Gnome imposes its font settings, thereby not affecting these applications anymore. Could something like this actually occur? (I'll disable preload anyway and use the system for a couple of weeks to see if anything changes - "unfortunately" I don't experience the problem every time I boot..).
Screenshot:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/23230352/Screenshot.png
NOTE: I borrowed this screenshot from someone else. As I only experience these large fonts in certain applications (Nautilus not being one of them) the screenshot is just to give an idea of what happens.
The font settings in System/Preferences/Appearance do not appear to change while this happens (it keeps showing 9pt, as it should).
Strangely enough:
Other applications (although I haven't tried them all, of course ;)) work perfectly fine while these three are having problems,
Generally, when I close the application and try again a little while later, the problem mysteriously enough has disappeared all by itself (but today it actually took at least 10 minutes),
Sometimes I can go days without experiencing any of this, but then again it can also happen three times in a row. The annoying part is that I can never be sure it'll fix itself if I simply close the application and restart it a couple seconds later (which usually does the trick).
Could this be related to using an application called 'preload', which loads frequently used applications into memory automatically (to speed up launching them)? I don't really know if it makes any sense, but my theory is that KMess, Skype and Firefox are loaded into memory at start-up before Gnome imposes its font settings, thereby not affecting these applications anymore. Could something like this actually occur? (I'll disable preload anyway and use the system for a couple of weeks to see if anything changes - "unfortunately" I don't experience the problem every time I boot..).
Screenshot:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/23230352/Screenshot.png
NOTE: I borrowed this screenshot from someone else. As I only experience these large fonts in certain applications (Nautilus not being one of them) the screenshot is just to give an idea of what happens.