Q I am looking for information on how to enlarge the fonts in Xara Xtreme, Gimp and similar programs that do not change when System Config > Appearance and Themes > Fonts are manipulated. I am using SimplyMepis - and like it!
A Xara Xtreme and Gimp use the GTK2 toolkit, whereas the System Config settings only affect KDE programs. I would normally recommend that you install the gtk2-engines-gtk-qt package, which makes Gnome and other GTK programs use your KDE settings and adds options to control the appearance of GTK programs to the Settings menu and the KDE Control Centre. However... although the package is installed by default with Mepis 6.0 it doesn't work. The programs are there but it is impossible to load it (others have reported the same on the SimplyMepis forums).
Worry not: there is another way to do what you want, by installing gnome-control-center and using gnome-font-properties. Run the program by typing gnome-font-properties in a terminal or the Run command dialog that appears when you press Alt+F2. This allows you to set Gnome fonts in a similar manner to the way you set KDE fonts. This technique will modify the fonts for the current session, but they will revert to the defaults on the next restart. To make the changes permanent, type this in a terminal as your normal user (not root):
ln -s /usr/lib/control-center/gnome-settings-daemon ~/.kde/Autostart/
This ensures that gnome-settings-daemon is started whenever you load your KDE desktop. The daemon causes your Gnome settings to be applied to all GTK programs.