feisty: GNOME, Firefox/Thunderbird and fonts

[Rashkae]

Kristian Rink wrote:
> Folks;
> 
> please have a look at the screen shot attached: Running feisty, I am
> mainly using GTK2 applications and GNOME as my default desktop. Mainly
> my GUI looks rather pleasing, except for Firefox and Thunderbird which,
> looking at the fonts, don't seem to use the same configuration the rest
> of the applications do. Why? Is there a good way of forcing these two
> beasts to provide the same visual appearance every other GTK2 app does?
> 
> Thanks in advance and bye,
> Kristian
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 

Unfortunately, Firefox/Thunderbird are not 'Gnome' applications per say, 
and do not use the Gnome Settings for their fonts.  There is no *easy* 
way to fix this, but it's doable.

The default font used by the Interface should be Sans.  You can make 
your system change the default Sans font to anything you want in your 
/etc/fonts/local.conf file.  Insert something like this:

         <alias>
                 <family>sans-serif</family>
                 <prefer>
                         <family>Arial</family>
                 </prefer>
         </alias>


Note: the local.conf file should start with:

<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>


and end with:

</fontconfig>

If you want to further customize Firefox itself, you need to find your 
profile directory.. Example: 
/home/.mozilla/firefox/somegibberish.default/chrome
Copy the userChrome-example.css to userChrome.css and edit that file to 
make changes.. It should be easy to see how to change the font sizes, 
and you can further specify the font you want here.  The trickiest part 
to editing this file is figuring out how to uncomment the sections of code.

The commented sections are denoted like so:

/*
*  This is a comment
*
* * { And here we have code
*
* }
*
*
*
*
*/


If you wanted to make a change to such a section, you have to edit it as 
follows:

/*
*  This is a comment
*/
  * { And here we have code

  }

/*
*
*
*/

Notice how there still remains a * in front of the {