Trying to replace fonts in an Xview application

Question

I am using a really old piece of software on my Linux Mint machine. The arrangement of buttons inside the application is messed up because (1) the font size is too large, and (2) likely, the spacing between buttons is not large enough.

I was hoping you had some suggestions, because at this moment, some of the buttons show up BEHIND lists (I can barely see their bottom edge), so I am unable to click them.

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The bin directory created by the installation program has many small applications.

The situation is fixed when I run any one application with an argument e.g., msi -font lucida-10 will give me small fonts, and the arrangement in that window is fixed. But, if I try to continue using this solution, the msi application calls in other applications as required, and the fonts in these applications again are too large.

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I tried using fonts.conf to replace the fonts, but the main problem is I can't identify the font that is offensive, so that perhaps I can replace it with lucida-8 and call it a day.

Alternatively, is there a way to modify the application files so that they run with some default arguments (e.g., to modify the msi file so that it permanently runs with the argument -font lucida 8)? Will alias work when one program is calling another program?

Answer 1

alias won’t work, but what you can do is rename all the programs (e.g., msi → msi.real) and then create a front-end script for each one; for example, create a script called msi that says

#!/bin/sh
exec msi.real -font lucida-10 "$@"

The "$@" says to pass the parameters to the msi script along to the msi.real program.  You may need to move that before the -font.

A safer way to do this is to put the front-end scripts in a separate directory, such as your private bin directory ($HOME/bin) or possibly a subdirectory of that.  This directory must appear in your search path ($PATH) before the directory where the Xview application actually lives.  This way, your msi script would say

#!/bin/sh
exec /real/path/to/msi -font lucida-10 "$@"

and you wouldn’t need to rename any of the real executables.