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I would like to increase the font size in the Grace editor window (e.g. 'File', 'Edit', 'Data', dropdown menus, push-buttons etc.). I am running Grace 5.1.23 on Ubuntu 14.04. I have run the program on 2 machines and 4 monitors with various resolutions--the font is consistently small on all of these. I have verified with another user that the font is rendering correctly on my machines (i.e. the font is tiny by default).

To be clear: I don't want to change default figure settings. I want to change the font size of the Grace editor itself.

I have tried:

  1. Editing the Default.agr file. This seems to only affect the default figure settings, not the editor itself.
  2. Looking through all the options in the Grace dropdown menus.
  3. Looking for help in the Grace Tutorial/FAQ etc.
  4. Squinting; craning my neck.

The font is insanely small. I would abandon this program altogether if my supervisor did not insist that I use it.

srcerer
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2 Answers2

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I had the same problem. xmgrace does not use the unity font mechanism, but it uses "old-school" X11-resources. You can set the xmgrace menue and dialog font sizes by creating a line

XMgrace*fontList: -adobe-helvetica-*-r-*-*-20-*-100-100-p-100-*-*

in the .Xresources file of your home directory. then call

xrdb .Xresources

to apply the settings.

If you don't like the helvetica font I selected (or if your system does not have it), you can pick a font you like using the "xfontsel" utility. Marvel at how far unix has come.

Baptiste Mille-Mathias
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Ingo
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It appears that there is no in-built option within grace/xmgrace to change the toolbar menu fonts.

Since the grace toolbar menu does not manifest as a standard Unity panel menu (at the top edge of your screen) the system-wide settings accessible using unity-tweak-tools do not affect the toolbar font size.

You could try modifying the grace/xmgrace source code and compile your own version with larger toolbar fonts. The source code for grace is available at ftp://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/pub/grace/src/.

feedMe
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  • Thanks for the information. Do you have any idea where in the source code the relevant settings live, or how one might locate them? I'm thinking it might be somewhere in the file src/xmgrace.c – srcerer Aug 10 '16 at 19:09
  • @srcerer Sorry I am not very familiar with the source and I don't know what each part does. xmgrace.c is probably a good place to start looking. – feedMe Aug 11 '16 at 13:23
  • @srcerer, have you find any solution or simply gave up? I'm facing practically the same problem (in my case the font is too big, though). – Enlico Jun 25 '18 at 09:02
  • @EnricoMariaDeAngelis No, I never found a solution. – srcerer Jun 25 '18 at 13:05
  • @EnricoMariaDeAngelis Why not use another plotting tool? Grace is great for some things but it is old and once you hit a limitation like this it is easier to switch to an alternative. – feedMe Jun 26 '18 at 10:19
  • @feedMe, I'm giving a look at [this section](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications#Data_evaluation); do you have any comments on the list, or any other suggestion (which you could add to the answer)? Btw, given your 1h-ago comment, you should change your bio here on SO. – Enlico Jun 26 '18 at 11:47
  • @EnricoMariaDeAngelis well, I still use it a lot, if that's what you mean :) But I also use other plotting tools. It depends on the job in hand. – feedMe Jun 27 '18 at 08:00
  • @feedMe, to answer to the first comment you directed to me, I've got used to `xmgrace` (even though I know practically nothing about it) since I can do something like `pipeline-outputting-two-columns < file-to-be-parsed | xmgrace -`. Can you suggest some other program that can be used to accomplish this task? I'm giving a look to `gnuplot` (which I have installed just because pgfplots LaTeX package uses it), but it seems it's not that immediate to plot a curve based on a 2-column stream. – Enlico Jun 27 '18 at 09:19
  • @EnricoMariaDeAngelis You gave a great example for when xmgrace provides something that other tools might not; piping as input. I haven't done this with gnuplot but maybe it is possible. I tend to use matplotlib more and more. If you wanted to pipe data in using matplotlib you could probably create your own default .py file (a template) that accepts commandline arguments (using `sys.argv`) and plots it. – feedMe Jun 27 '18 at 10:08
  • [This](https://stackoverflow.com/a/31080317/5825294) is the answer about how to pipe columns to `gnuplot`. It's not that immediate as it is with `xmgrace`, though... – Enlico Jun 27 '18 at 19:37