[GTALUG] YAD-Zenity-GTK on Pi - assistance needed

[Giles Orr]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2020 at 20:47, Giles Orr <gilesorr at gmail.com> wrote:
> YAD ("Yet Another Dialog") is a fork of Zenity - essentially a way to
> display GTK+ dialogues from shell scripts.  I've chosen YAD because it
> supports a couple things Zenity doesn't have, namely form buttons and
> tabs.  I've created an ugly but functional interface that's meant to
> go on a 3.5" touch screen on a Raspberry Pi.  But here's the problem:
> by the time it gets on a screen that small, the buttons are too small
> to reliably poke with a finger.  So I want to increase the font size.
> All that was needed to fix that on my Fedora desktop was:
>
>     # file: ~/.configs/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
>     [Settings]
>     gtk-font-name = Sans 32
>
> And voila, 'yad' appears with a super-huge font.
>
> However - this behaviour isn't replicated on the Pi.  It's an old(ish)
> Debian stretch install on an old Pi B (not Pi 2 B, just "Pi B").  I'm
> pretty sure that ~/.configs/gtk-3.0/settings.ini is the right file,
> because when I mis-configured it, 'yad' complained loudly.  But it
> ignores the font setting that works fine on another host.  I tried
> 'yad --font' which throws up what amounts to a GTK font selection
> dialogue, and "Sans 32" is a valid font on the Pi.
>
> Anyone got any ideas on this?

I'm reviving this thread because I think I understand it a bit better
and the question is a bit different.  I've re-installed the OS
(Raspberry Pi 10 instead of Raspbian 9 last time) and the touch screen
drivers.  The behaviour is precisely the same.  I've also confirmed
that the problem isn't with Debian: font sizes increase as expected on
Debian.  But what I've noticed is this: the appearance of YAD on
Fedora and Debian is essentially identical, but on Raspberry Pi OS the
appearance of the tabs are different, and the buttons - which have
rounded corners on Fedora and Debian and occasionally icons - have
square corners and no icons.

What this suggests to me (I'm guessing here, hoping someone can help
me figure it out) is that YAD is compiled with GTK support on Debian
and Fedora, but some other graphical library on the Pi.  Although - as
I established above, YAD still reads the GTK3 configuration file on
the Pi - it just doesn't respect it.  How can I figure out if this
guess is correct?  Is recompiling YAD with GTK3 support sane or
possible on a Pi (if I'm correct)?  Is there another configuration
file that might affect the font size?

Buying a larger touch screen is a possibility, but the 3.5" screen
would be perfect for what I'm trying to achieve so I'd rather not.
(Cost isn't a problem ... but obstinance might be.)

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com