Text too big on plots

[cormullion]

Just wondering why the text is always too big:

julia> using Gadfly
julia> plot(x=rand(10), y=rand(10))

[dcjones]

It's a Safari bug that I've yet to invent a work around for. In Safari -> Preferences -> Advanced, there's an option "Never use font sizes smaller than". If you uncheck that, it should look correct.

This feature is supposed prevent fonts smaller than 9pt (or whatever it's set to), but it's a broken implementation that doesn't take into account how units work in SVG. Gadfly uses millimeters, and the result is that it prevents fonts less that 9mm, which is 25pt, which is of course really big.

[cormullion]

OK, thanks!

[Keno]

@dcjones You could try reporting it on Apple's bugtracker if you haven't already. They're usually pretty responsive.

[dcjones]

Good idea. I just did so.

[dfannius]

For what it's worth, this can occur in Firefox as well (I'm using version 38.0.5 on OS X 10.10.3) with effectively the same workaround (Preferences / Content / Fonts & Colors / Advanced / Minimum Font Size = None). I don't know if they're using the same SVG backend or if it's an independent issue.

I'm also including the phrase "large text" in this comment to make this page easier to find for other people with the same issue (I didn't find it until I searched for "big text").