I've been kind of switching between KDE, GNOME and Openbox for the last few months and something that I had previously not noticed has started to annoy me. If I use Firefox in Openbox, the font that I had selected with gtk-chtheme is used for the application font, but within Firefox itself, I notice that some fonts appear larger than others, but only in Openbox. I poked around a bit and if I run gnome-font-properties, it seems to correct this, but that seems like a sloppy solution, as I don't run gnome-settings-daemon (which corrects everything). Does anyone know of what I can add to my .gtkrc-2.0 file for font settings?

I think this is a firefox issue. Normally, apps either pick up on the font defined in .gtkrc-2.0, or they get told what font to use by gnome-settings-daemon. Firefox works great with gnome-settings-daemon, but doesn't do what it should do with the .gtkrc-2.0. I think you might just have to live with it, unless you want to run a settings daemon.

There are 2 methods of defining fonts in your .gtkrc-2.0, it's recommended to use both for backwards compatibility.

the first is like this ->


style "user-font"
{
font_name="Bitstream Vera Sans 10"
}
widget_class "*" style "user-font"

And again like this ->

gtk-font-name="Bitstream Vera Sans 10"

Firefox will only use the font described in the gtk-font-name section.

^ That solved the problem with the actual application font appearing bigger than normal, but the problem with the webpage font still exists. Getting closer!

Do you run any xsettings manager at all? If not, how do you get your apps use the GTK theme you've selected?

Well I decided not to run the gnome-settings-daemon to set my GTK preferences because it also brings some other GNOME-related settings that I'm not interested in. The only settings file that I'm using is my .gtkrc-2.0 file:

Nice, this thread helped me solve a minor inconvenience I was having but never bothered looking up how to fix

Ya, its a handy little file to keep around, especially if you don't have a GNOME installation on your system. I may actually submit this over at Gentoo-Wiki, and let the experts correct it.