Hello, WINE developers!
While working on a cross-platform project, I tried to run some self-compiled GTK/W32 applications on a Debian GNU/Linux Sarge system using WINE 0.9.29, compiled from source. They crashed immediately.
After some long, but unsuccessful Google sessions and some long, but successful RTFS/debugging sessions, I am now able to run and test my cross-compiled GTK/W32 applications in WINE. :-)
Furthermore, I can start the W32 version of The GIMP up to the moment where it tries to load its plug-ins. (Without the plug-ins, the remaining parts of The GIMP even seem to work flawlessly.)
Since Google told me that running GTK/W32 applications in WiNE - in particular: The GIMP - was an unsolved problem, I am hereby telling you what I observed and what I did.
* Out of the box, pango (GTK's font renderer) does not find any suitable font.
OTOH a non-GTK program, opening a MessageBox, works flawlessly, so the fonts are there.
* When I tell pango to use a TrueType font *and* place the .ttf file in c:/windows/fonts/, I can start GTK's "Hello, world!" program, but the text is >300 pixels high, and thus unusable.
(Real-world programs used to crash with a message similar to "memory exhausted", but trying to reproduce the exact message now results in *running* programs with a giant font. Sorry.)
I conclude that (at least in my installation) pango does not find WINE's pixel fonts (even if I place them in c:/windows/fonts/), and sees the TTFs only with a wrong scaling factor.
* When I tell pango to use the font "Sans 0.1", I get satisfying results.
(In concrete, I got it working with the following gtkrc:
style "wine-default-style" { font_name = "Sans 0.1" }
widget "*" style "wine-default-style"
)
I cannot fine-tune the font size. Using "Sans 0.2" or "Sans 0.01" yields exactly the same as "Sans 0.1". There seems to be one more intermediate size at "Sans 0.5"; after that the "normal" font sizes start with "Sans 1".
Since both WINE and pango/GTK are free software, I am confident that these problems will be solved in the long run. I hope that you can use my observations.
BTW, let me thank you for over 10 years of WINE by hacking Tom Payne's famous quote on Unix:
Ten years ago mainstream users were choosing WABI over WINE. Now they are choosing $PROPRIETARY_FORK_OF_WINE over WINE. What part of that message aren't they getting?
Keep on your excellent work!
Cheers,
Peter