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Configure fonts, etc in GUI

Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2020 4:25 pm
by mattnolan
Hi, I'm planning to use Neuron for some teaching and want to make the fonts in the GUI larger. It's been a while since I used the GUI and I can't find the configuration files. I've found some older forum posts that appear to be redundant. I've also played around with ivoc_style(). This appears to execute but doesn't do anything to the GUI. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm running Neuron 7.7 and Python 3.6.9 under Ubuntu 18.04.

Re: Configure fonts, etc in GUI

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2020 12:34 am
by ted
Under Windows it's easy. Assuming that an instance of the PWManager class exists (it will exist if you started NEURON by executing nrngui, or if your code has executed a
load_file("nrngui.hoc")
statement), then an instance of the PWManager class will exist and you can use its scale() function to change the size of all of NEURON's GUI windows. Try this:

objref pwm
pwm = PWManager[0]

then execute

pwm.scale(1)

and if that isn't big enough, try a numerical argument < 1 (e.g. 0.8 or even smaller). Sorry, this doesn't work under MacOS or Linux.


Under Linux you could try changing the font sizes specified in nrn/share/nrn/lib/nrn.defaults
Look for these three lines

*font: *helvetica-medium-r-normal*--14*
*MenuBar*font: *-helvetica-bold-o-normal--14*
*MenuItem*font: *-helvetica-bold-o-normal--14*

The 14 "should" control the size of the font displayed. Try different values and see if that works. My experience doing this under CentOS was not great--in the end I simply had to decrease display resolution, or reboot to MSWin. My choice was to decrease display resolution because that also made the text in NEURON's xterm bigger.

Re: Configure fonts, etc in GUI

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2020 4:12 am
by mattnolan
Hi Ted, thanks for the quick answer. I can't find a file in my installation called nrn.defaults. I'm using a version that's installed via pip3 and called from the Python command line. I'll see if I can figure it out from how it sets up the GUI...