notify-osd seems to be unable to use some of the fonts

The font sting parsing function is buggy. Thanks for the heads up!

For the impatient the branch fixing this can be found here https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~macslow/notify-osd/fix-396736

Fix committed to Karmic maintainance branch of notify-osd.

This bug was fixed in the package notify-osd - 0.9.24-0ubuntu1

---------------
notify-osd (0.9.24-0ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  * New upstream version:
    - fixed regression for newline-character replacement in the text_filter
    - fixed fonts issues (LP: #396736)
    - fixed crasher (LP: #425508
    - fixed another crasher (LP: #437088)
    - added workaround for icon-name-prefix substitution
    - fixed accidentally deleted drawing of drop-shadow for title-text
    - avoid re-executing glow-/dim-effect when synchronizing timeouts of bubbles

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:23:14 +0200

I'm not sure if it's exactly this bug, or if the effect I'm seeing is deliberate, but after updating today the notification bubbles are really small. I have a 127dpi screen and use 6.5pt as my application font, and it seems like notify-osd is now using 4 or 5pt and I can barely read it!

Chris, only one thing can help... screenshots (with visible samples of other UI-elements using the system-wide font).

per our IRC discussion... I think the reason I'm seeing slightly different behaviour is that my application font is set to 6.5pt and notify-osd's extract_point_size() is assuming that font sizes are integers.
I really quick hack to convert that function to sscanf for %f and return a gdouble seems to work, but other than the fontconfig manual I can't conclusively prove that fractional font sizes are legal in gtk/gnome.

Chris, to correctly solve this issue I would need a robust regular expression for extracting a floating point number (from something using the format "<string> <float>"), which I can feed into Gregex in extract_point_size(). Also its prototype would have to be changed to return a gdouble. With fabs() it has to be ensured to never return a negative value. I'm not sure at the moment how pedantic one has to be about negative values though. For that very reason, extract_point_size() right now returns gunit.

Mirco: I'm wondering if it wouldn't be easier and more robust to use something like pango_font_description_from_string () to parse the font string into the family name and size?

I'd want people considerably better at this than I am to confirm I'm not on crack, but the attached patch seems to do pretty sane things for me.

Also those people would want to have a text editor that didn't just mangle all the whitespace. Sorry :(

Per IRC request from Mirco, I have rebased my patch against lp:notify-osd/karmic and also taken the opportunity to tidy it up.

[11:21] <MacSlow> compare the reported "title-height: ..." and "body-height: ..."
                  from you patched notify-osd with unpatched lp:notify-osd/karmic

After setting my application font to 7pt:

-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-orig)- killall -15 notify-osd ; DEBUG=1 ./src/notify-osd
notify-osd: no process found
** Message: DEBUG mode enabled
font-size: 7pt
dpi: 127.0
pixels/EM: 12.35
width: 296 px
title-height: 7.00 pt
body-height: 6.30 pt

^C
-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-orig)- cd ../notify-osd-cmsj/
-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-cmsj)- killall -15 notify-osd ; DEBUG=1 ./src/notify-osd
** Message: DEBUG mode enabled
font-size: 7.000000pt
dpi: 127.0
pixels/EM: 12.35
width: 296 px
title-height: 7.00 pt
body-height: 6.30 pt

^C
-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-cmsj)-

Which seems like a good sign :)

With the setting back at 6.5pt:

-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-orig)- killall -15 notify-osd ; DEBUG=1 ./src/notify-osd
notify-osd: no process found
** Message: DEBUG mode enabled
font-size: 5pt
dpi: 127.0
pixels/EM: 8.82
width: 211 px
title-height: 5.00 pt
body-height: 4.50 pt

^C
-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-orig)- cd ../notify-osd-cmsj/
-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-cmsj)- killall -15 notify-osd ; DEBUG=1 ./src/notify-osd
notify-osd: no process found
** Message: DEBUG mode enabled
font-size: 6.500000pt
dpi: 127.0
pixels/EM: 11.47
width: 275 px
title-height: 6.50 pt
body-height: 5.85 pt

^C
-(cmsj@kiryo)-(/tmp/notify-osd-cmsj)-

and the notifications look better :)

Also pushed to lp:~cmsj/+junk/notify-osd-lp396736

For the moment until the font-size extraction is fixed, please don't use fractional parts in your application font-size. So if you're using 9.5 use either 9.0 or 10.0

Branch with fix (complete with correct extraction of font point-size with fractional-part) can be found here https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~macslow/notify-osd/fix-fractional-point-size

Hello
Having a hard time finding the fix for a very unreadable Popup font in my 8.5 Lotus notes install cant seem to change anything either with Lotus or with my system fonts?

Any help ....?
Alan

This bug was fixed in the package notify-osd - 0.9.25-0ubuntu1

---------------
notify-osd (0.9.25-0ubuntu1) lucid; urgency=low

  * New upstream version:
    - conditional refresh of blurred tiles, prevent regeneration of
      tiles if title, body, icon or value didn't change
    - font-sizes with fractional parts don't cause bubble to become tiny anymore
      (fixes LP: #396736, LP: #457655, LP: #458413, LP: #459290, LP: #459689)
    - all but drop-shadow use the faster exponential blur now
 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:41:32 -0800

it seems to happen with all fonts. I use ttf-droid and it happened. Very Annoying.

How do you upgrade to 0.925-0ubuntu1? I only have 0.924-0ubuntu1.