Status bar ugly font in Linux

[Tristan Croll]

Possibly just something to do with the new PyQt version? Sometime in the last couple of weeks the text in the status bar in Linux suddenly started looking really ugly (and different depending on whether it's running windowed or maximized). I'll attach images of the two cases.

[Conrad Huang]

TomG reimplemented the status line using OpenGL to avoid the event-processing issues with trying to update the current status message. The font used on Windows certainly looks a bit large and crude. Sounds like it doesn't look great on Linux either.

[Tom Goddard]

Unfortunately we are not able to use Qt font rendering for status messages because that is only possible by running the event loop, and running the event loop causes all kinds of problems when code emitting a status message expected no side effects. So we are rendering the status text with OpenGL. This is not going to be as nice looking at the operating system rendering it where text antialiasing and sub-pixel alignment is optimized. That said, the text is taller than the status area in the attached images, so at least it should be sized correctly. That is reported as another ticket, #830.

[Tom Goddard]

Ticket #830 made many improvements to the status line text quality. I think this addressed the ugly clipped jagged text in the attached images. If the Linux status text quality still looks bad please rereport it with a new screen capture.