Harmonise all fonts and font sizes for ALL application frameworks

Brainstorm
1

It is immensely frustrating and a PitA effort-sink when on installing a much needed Gnome (or other non-KDE/Plasma native) app the fonts don’t match what I’ve chosen for KDE. Sometimes it’s merely an aesthetic difference - a different font/glyph/font family - which, as a designer is more traumatic than you might think, but more often it’s also a size issue, rendering the new app really difficult to use if its font comes up too large or too small.

It would save a lot of effort to have an automation that can deal with non-native apps; knows where the appropriate config is and can, in the install process offer to harmonise the visitor’s visuals (font, font-size, colours) with the native KDE/Plasma choices. A stretch goal could be to map the app’s dialogues to native ones - but I guess that’s quite a big ask!?

2

Ah, so I’m guessing here we’re looking for some kind of really intelligent (certainly a lot more than any currently existing AI) system that can identify what’s happening - also to be aware of what’s meant by ‘non-native’ and then automatically apply magical fixes?

There are so many different underlying graphical toolkits, apart from Qt and Gnome… Sometimes it’s a question of GTK apps not using KDE’s settings - and theming across toolkits was never automated… they come with their own configuration systems, and these aren’t things that can be done universally.

Many applications also store their own look and feel settings which override system settings, and then there’s the hugely complex MULTIPLE layers of configuration.

Just one example I dealt with - Keyboard stuff. You have many different layouts, then you can create your own custom layout, that’s marvellous…

Looking back, I can’t recall all of the actual folder locations that I had to deal with… and theming is worse.

You know - there’s the gtkrc-2.0, there’s the qt5ct, and a hugely complex hierarchy.

So in the end, your solution is - only install native apps, or stop worrying too much about it.

KDE peeps already work hard to develop applications which are fluid and work across many platforms (convergence…), but really I think it remains an admirable, but also constantly moving target to aim for.

Especially when it’s expressed as fuzzily as ‘just harmonise the visitor’s visuals’.

For now, we have to focus on specific problematic applications (of which you gave zero examples) and look for actual targets and solutions.

3

The point of agentic AI in this case is that it aggregates all that sparse knowledge - it doesn’t even need to be complete. It just needs to me better than ‘meh! Your problem!’. The knowledge can be augmented over releases.

It’s not magic - it’s just user centred solutions.

I’m not naive, I work on agentic AI on mainframe software - to improve the user experience in a possibly more complex environment than this?

4

Well then, bring it on - but I’m not sure that Plasma users would be happy about integrated agentic AI

5

TBH, it could be a script. Just one that has a broad knowledge of where the bodies are buried and can sneak in (where it’s possible/feasible) and poke in the KDE config for the font/font-size into the appropriate places - Surely there can’t be that many variations?

Maybe a script that exploits external YAML specification of what/where to make changes. So, users could submit a form/YAML that specifies a newly discovered target for poking. Then the script could just add that target and all users could benefit. Would have to be tolerant of errors/no-finds/can’t-edit type scenarios

Just a thought