On Tue, 2019-09-10 at 20:43 +0200, oliver wrote:
hi, did some more testing on LINUX and it really seems that UBUNTU is the problem here.
i did a fresh install of UBUNTU 19.04 and DEBIAN 10 on my machine. both with XFCE as desktop and nothing else but PD 0.49.3 installed via "apt-get install"
the font rendering difference is huge (see attachment or here)
https://wolke.klingt.org/index.php/s/VRoJ3e6xTpsoKOD
as you can see, in both situations, the same settings are used and the same fonts are loaded at startup. yet in UBUNTU the spacing between characters is much larger (also in PD's console window) than in DEBIAN.
Are you by chance using a HiDPI screen?
Two laptops both having Ubuntu 18.04 installed show different results here (both Pd 0.50.0; Tk 8.6.8).
The rendering of your test patch looks similar to your Debian Buster version on my box that has a 15" 1680x1050px monitor. My other box with a 14" 2560x1440px monitor displays the test patch exactly like your Ubuntu 19.04 version.
I got annoyed by this, too, over a year ago, but found a work-around by manually setting the tk scaling to 1.7 in pd-gui.tcl:289. With that value, the rendering of your test patch on my HiDPI box looks exactly the same as your Debian Buster version.
I somewhat got tired from nagging about this issue, especially since I don't feel enabled to help in any way. Those font rendering issues seem really confusing, complicated, and hard to tackle, but they still bother me, because it is not only a matter of appearance, but sometimes even of functionality.
It appears that the HiDPI detection affects the font size in the menu and the font size in the labels of iemguis, but not "patcher" font in objects and messages. However, changing 'tk scaling' in pd-gui.tcl affects _only_ font size in iemgui labels, but not of menus. Patcher font seems "immune" against any environmental influences (which is good), but iemgui label font seems not. I don't care about the menu, it actually makes sense to scale it according to resolution so that appeared size stays the same.
Roman