First of all maybe I should present my problems more in depth:
I am adapting a gui for sight week / poor sighted ( whats the propper word in
english??) people to work on data entry, they need large fonts to see whats
happening.
The app is used both on win and unix, develeoped mainly on linux.
Since I actually want to use my computer, setting a perverted system font is
not a serious alternative, also I do a lot of coding while comuting, so I
cant have a sysfont=20 on my laptop - for crying out loud I wouldnt eaven be
able to see my wingIDE main window 
My first hope that a simple SetSize() would do the trick has turned out to be
not the case.
So far the only control where SetSize() works seems to be StaticText and
buttons, all the other I have tried have some kind of issue.
Since I need to get the largefont version out the door asap, for the moment I
have started creating wrapper classes that "fakes" propper behaviour for the
needed controls
Im almost certain that Im doing it the wrong way, that Im missing something.
Shouldnt it be possible to do such a simple thing as displaying a TextCtrl or
a List in a "odd" fontsize???
Surely somebody else must have done that in the past, or am I the only person
that has tried to do that? - seems highly unlikely.
···
--------
Some responses to my first posts on this, from Robin Dunn and to Tim Roberts
Why do you want to use wxTE_MULTILINE to create a single-line text control?
See the online doc for wxTextCtrl, specifically the paragraph
"wxTextCtrl styles"
According to this paragraph only multilines alowes you to set what font to use
So to get at least something that looks as a large wxTextCtrl I set the style
to multiline, and rezize it down to only be one (character) line high.
If somebody inputs to long a text, the control wraps the line, but at least
for normal input values it looks normal, and the odd behaviour when inputing
"to long" data is at least not ruining anything, the users can be instructed
about this odd behaviour.
It's also easy to confuse points and pixels when working with text. 10
point text will be 13 to 16 pixels tall on a Windows desktop.
Ok I was a bit unclear in my first post (dosen't that happen all the time)
I hope that I haven't got that part wrong, more on that below
The textctrl does mor than just draw the text. It potentially has borders
and probably will have at least a bit of empty space around the text area...
And how much space that really is will be platform dependent.
Yup that was my first guess, the problem is that the "error" or diff between
what GetFullTextExtent() reports and what works by try&error is non linear.
At the end of this mail is the code I used
------- A table of what I have measured -----------
Colums
--------
A = FontSize
B = h + d as reported by GetFullTextExtent (),
since e always returned 0 I didnt care about him
C = Required, after trry and error
D = Result of my height function
A B C D
6 10 16 17
8 12 18 18
9 15 18 21
10 14 18 20
11 17 20 23
12 17 20 23
13 21 23 26
14 19 22 24
15 23 25 27
18 26 27 30
19 31 31 34
20 32 32 35
21 33 33 35
22 36 35 38
23 37 36 39
24 32 35 35
25 39 38 40
30 48 45 48
36 58 55 56
40 64 60 60
My first guess was that if I just add something like 5 or 10 it will be ok,
but that doesnt work, since the measuerd values goes below needed for
fontsize above 20, so something must be seriously wrong.
If I just would need to add a few point for borders etc, it should be the same
for all, and since I get a non linear error it seems that I have to calculate
the desired value.
height = int( 0.81 * (h + d) + 9 + 0.5 )
Is by no means perfect, but it gets close enough until I find something more
apropriate.
Any help would be greatly apretiated, if nothing else I will post my wxfnt
wrappers, but I hope there is a neater solution to this.
regards /Jacob Lundqvist
------- The code used in the test ----------
class FontHeight:
def GetHeight( self, txtAttr ):
#
# Since I cant figure out how to detect the actual fontsize
# correctly I do a little equation that hopefully gets it right...
font = txtAttr.GetFont()
font_height = font.GetPointSize()
w,h,d,e = self.GetFullTextExtent( '', font )
height = int( 0.81 * (h + d) + 9 + 0.5 )
return height
class wxfntTextCtrl(wxTextCtrl,FontHeight):
def __init__( self, parent, id, value = '',
pos=(0,0), size = wxDefaultSize,
style = 0, txtAttr = None ):
if txtAttr and not (style & wxTE_PASSWORD):
# argh if we do multiline on a password field
# password is echoed in cleartext!
# dosnt matter to much people can live with
# stars in the wrong size...
style = style | wxTE_MULTILINE
wxTextCtrl.__init__( self, parent, id, value = value, pos = pos,
size = size, style = style )
if txtAttr:
self.SetDefaultStyle(txtAttr)
self.SetSize((-1,self.GetHeight(txtAttr)))
if value:
self.Clear()
self.AppendText(value)
else:
# need to set some text before clear to get
# size updated
self.AppendText(' ')
self.Clear()
------- Environment ---------
Distro: Mandrake 8.2
python-2.2-9mdk
wxGTK-2.3.2-1
wxGTK6-2.2.9-3mdk
wxGTK6-gl-2.2.9-3mdk
wxGTK-devel-2.3.2-1
wxGTK-gl-2.3.2-1
wxPython-2.3.2.1-1