I noticed that GTK1 applications have a rather large and ugly font on my system. I searched the internet for a solution and found references to files like .gtkrc-1.2-gnome and .gtkrc-mine and some font definitions I have to put in there. But none of these solutions worked out for me. I found another reference to the program xfontsel and with all these partial information I was able to find a nice working solution. I hope it will also work for others.

The xfontsel program can be used to find a nice looking font definition which can be used in GTK1 applications. It starts with all filters set to * which means that the filter does not filter anything. I started to configure the filter like this:

• Click rgstry and select iso10646 because we want the font to have unicode capability.
• Click wght and select medium because we want the font to be normal and not bold.
• Click slant and select r because we want a regular style and not italic or underlined.
• Click spc and select p because we want a proportional font and not a monospaced one.
• Click pxlsz and select 12 as the font size (At least this one has the best size for me).
• Click fmly and try out which of the remaining fonts looks best. I choosed Helvetica.

After this procedure my font-definition looked like this:

-\*-helvetica-medium-r-\*-\*-12-\*-\*-\*-p-\*-iso10646-\*

So now we have the font definition but where do we put it? I first tried /.gtkrc which worked for some GTK1 apps but when I tried out lazarus-ide then I still got ugly fonts there. So I checked where this darn program looks for its GTK configuration by using this command:

strace lazarus-ide 2>&1 | grep gtkrc

I did the same with the other GTK1 apps. They all used lots of possible locations for the config file. One generic-looking one was used by all of them, so I decided to use it: ~/.gtkrc-1.2-gnome2.

So copy the definition from xfontsel to the clipboard by clicking the select button and then create the file ~/.gtkrc-1.2-gnome2 and put the following code into it (with your personal font definition):

style "default-text" {
       fontset = "-\*-helvetica-medium-r-\*-\*-12-\*-\*-\*-p-\*-iso10646-\*"
}

Now start a GTK1 application and hope that the font looks as smooth as it does on my system. Here is the difference (Left: Old ugly font, Right: New nice font):