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see Bug 26987 see Bug 26987 comment 7 Right now, a new Control will have the system's default font. If one creates a dialog one has to call setFont() for each Control of the dialog in order achieve a consistent look. It is especially error prone if you have a complex design with several stacked Composites -- A in B in C in D in E etc. A solution would be to change the behaviour of Control: - if the Control has a parent, then it's parent's font will be used - if the Control does not have a parent, then the system's default font will be used
Created attachment 2583 [details] windows patch I have tested this patch and it works. Once you change the dialog font in Preferances/Workbench/Font all dialogs will now use the chosen font, unless setFont() was called on a Control explicitly.
Created attachment 2584 [details] other OS' patch I was not able to test these fixes. I still think that they should work ;) Implementation notes Carbon: I looked at how the system default font is created in Display (line 969) -- instead of a call to OS I passed getThemeFont() w/ the fID of the parent's MacFont (see MacFont 37/38 that this is the desired short for getThemeFont()). Implementation notes GTK: The Control's default font is not set in the constructer but lazily initialized in getFont(). I looked at how the system default font is created in Display (line 937) -- instead supplying the font_desc of a GtkStyle I supplied the parent's font description; notice lines 932/933 in Display and lines 1348/1349 in Control are similar. Implementation notes Photon: The default font in Display is stored in a byte-Array TEXT_FONT (line 1117) -- in Control setDefaultFont() setFont(byte[]) is called w/ this byte-Array. I call setFont(Font) which retrieves the byte-Array of the parent's font and calls setFont(byte[]). Implementation notes Motif: Similar to Carbon, but Font.motif_new() wants a font handle this time (Font line 550).
I believe that this would actually break a heck of a lot of OS settings on most platforms. The best an OS will give SWT is a default UI font - this is far too general in most cases. Individual OS's may give more information than this but this is all they can get consistently. Frustration with the small range of font settings provided by the OS prompted the JFace team to add the dialog font which we have now exposed in the UI. This font is only meant to be used in dialogs, not in windows or views which tend to have better fonts inhertied from the OS. Using windows as an example there are already fairly rich font settings provided by the OS for windows (look in Properties->Appearance on your desktop) but no such support is provided for dialogs (they use the message box font everywhere by default). Context is important here and SWT is at too low of a level to be able to determine this.
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see Bug 26987 comment #14
