NEURON's GUI font too big for your small screen? No problem!

[ted]

The problem: it looks like the fonts used by NEURON's GUI tools are on steriods, so
that the NEURON Main Menu toolbar is alarmingly big, and the RunControl panel covers
up a huge chunk of your screen.

This happens a lot with laptop computers. The fix is simple: just tell NEURON to use a
smaller font, or, if you're using MSWin, you might try a different mswin_scale factor.

How?

NEURON has a configuration file that specifies many properties, including important
attributes of the GUI such as font size. Under MSWin this file is called
c:\nrnxx\lib\nrn.def
and under UNIX/Linux it's
/usr/local/nrn/share/nrn/lib/nrn.defaults
(or just
nrn/share/nrn/lib/nrn.defaults
if you installed into your home directory).

Inside this file you'll find

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*mswin_scale: 1.2

If you use MSWin, try changing this to

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*mswin_scale: 1.5

The next time you start NEURON, you'll be pleased to see that many more GUI
windows can fit on your screen.

An alternative is to change the font size. For MSWin, the default is

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*font: *Arial*bold*--12*

You might try changing this to

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*font: *Arial*bold*--10*

You'll also want to uncomment the two following lines and change the font sizes to 10,
i.e. they should read

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*MenuBar*font: *Arial*bold*--10*
*MenuItem*font: *Arial*bold*--10*

UNIX/Linux users can customize font names and sizes by tinkering with the default

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*font: *helvetica-medium-r-normal*--14*

and uncommenting and altering the two following lines, which specify the MenuBar and
MenuItem fonts.

NEURON's configuration file contains many other settings that can be used to
customize the appearance of NEURON--see
How do I change the background color used in NEURON's shape plots and other graphs?
and
How do I change the color scale used in shape plots?
in NEURON's FAQ list
http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/faq/general-questions