Eclipse PDE on Mac OS X: Getting the correct font size at runtime?

Question

Hi.

There's an annoying "feature" when using Eclipse PDE on Mac OS X: the font size of the runtime IDE is not the same as the true IDE. If you're developing a plug-in and you launch an Eclipse instance to test it (from within Eclipse), you will notice that the spawned instance looks very different from the original running Eclipse instance. The fonts are big and ugly. This makes it hard to fine-tune the plug-in UI.

BTW, I did not encounter that behavior of Windows.

Any ideas how to quickly solve this issue?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Eclipse saves its preferences on a per-workspace base. You probably don't use the same workspace for both eclipse instances. Threfore you'd need to set the preferences for the spawn once or copy it to the spawn-workspace from your original one.

Now you've got the default settings and that is probably not what you've set in your instance.

Answer 2

Found the answer.

You need to add the following VM argument to your launch configuration: -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

I opened a defect about it. Hopefully it will be fixed.