Hello, I recently upgraded from KDE 4.7.4 to KDE 4.8.2. While most things are working fine, I notice that fonts appear differently with the upgrade.

Most notably is the vertical spacing (padding) between items in the Application Launcher (using classic view). There is a pronounced increase in vertical spacing between each item, and I am wondering how to go about shrinking this vertical space to where it was before (I am using the same system fonts as before).

Here is an image that will hopefully show this (4.8 on the left, previous version on the right): http://i.imgur.com/QfSax.jpg

I have looked around, but cannot seem to find an "easy" setting, so hopefully there is a configuration file somewhere I can fiddle with to do this.

Thanks for any suggestions.

The left menu does not look like it'd be oxygen styled -> kcmshell4 style
(the ui style -aside the font extents- controls those margins)

luebking wrote:The left menu does not look like it'd be oxygen styled -> kcmshell4 style
(the ui style -aside the font extents- controls those margins)

Hi, yes, it isn't the Oxygen style, it is the Air style. Changing to Oxygen has no effect on the vertical spacing (padding) of the left menu, it just changed a few of the colors.

Is there a file that controls the ui style?

"kcmshell4 style", NOT "kcmshell4 desktoptheme"

luebking wrote:"kcmshell4 style", NOT "kcmshell4 desktoptheme"

Thanks, but where is this changed (file location or menu setting)?

I beg your pardon?
Those are config dialogs - if you actually want to write that by hand, search for the "style" key in ~/.config/Trolltech.conf and the "widgetStyle" key in ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals
Typing there has however no immediate impact - you got to restart the application (plasma-desktop, i assume: "kquitapp plasma-desktop; sleep 1; plasma-desktop")

luebking wrote:I beg your pardon?
Those are config dialogs - if you actually want to write that by hand, search for the "style" key in ~/.config/Trolltech.conf and the "widgetStyle" key in ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals
Typing there has however no immediate impact - you got to restart the application (plasma-desktop, i assume: "kquitapp plasma-desktop; sleep 1; plasma-desktop")

Okay, sorry, config dialogs then. Which config dialogs control this behavior?

"kcmshell4 style" - you cannot impact the value directly, the UI style usually hardcodes / calculates the value.
Since one of your screenshots seems to show the plastique (just random guess) style and the other one the oxyen style, one can expect different values for those paddings which should revert as soon as you change back to the oxygen style.
The only direct impact you can take is to select a font with huge (eg Segoe UI) or "normal" (most other fonts) extents (ie. blank space above/below the characters)

Thanks leubking, I found the style setting under "SystemSettings > Application Appearance > Style > Widget Style". It was on a Widget Style other than Oxygen, and setting it back to Oxygen resulted in a different appearance of the launcher, with less vertical padding.

d'oohhh
now i get that you did not get that "kcmshell4 style" is a command that can be entered into krunner or konsole to open that dialog directly (kcmshell4 is the the version 4 of the KConfigModule loader) - and how should you if no one ever told you!

i'm deeply sorry - i didn't mean to play games or so

Heh, no problem leubking, I wouldn't assume anything of the sort from you, so it's all good. I knew about using "systemsettings" in the terminal, but I didn't know about "kcmshell4 style".

I probably should have been able to figure this out, but you know some things just elude me, and I definitely appreciate the help!