How to increase font size in Pidgin’s buddy list

My workplace has me using Pidgin on Windows 7. I am having trouble making it play nicely with my accessibility requirements. Specifically, as a GTK app out of its native habitat it is not following my desktop preferences for larger fonts.

Most importantly I need to increase the font size in the buddy list. I can change the size for a conversation using the built-in preferences, but that doesn't affect the buddy list. It appears (from Googling) that I need to write a custom theme for this. I have no prior GTK experience.

I found this page about writing themes; I followed the instructions there and successfully installed the example they give, which worked. Then I set out to write what I actually want.

Following the model there I created the following theme in a new, parallel directory. This does not load (it's not on the list when I try to change the theme), so apparently there's an error (but I can't identify it):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<theme type="pidgin buddy list"
       name="Buddy List"
       author="..."
       image="Example_theme_logo.png" >
      <description>Increase font size in buddy list</description>   
  <buddys>
    <contact_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/>   
    <online_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/>   
    <away_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/>   
    <offline_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/> 
    <idle_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/>    
    <status_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/> 
    <message_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/>
    <message_nick_said_text font="Verdana [14.0]"/>  
</buddys>
</theme>

I've tried several things for the value of font based on this documentation:

• font="14"
• font="[14]"
• font="Verdana [14]"
• above with 14.0

I also tried omitting the image declaration in theme (really, images are the last thing I care about…) in case that was a bad reference somehow, but that didn't change anything.

So I might not be specifying the size correctly, and there might be some other error in this theme that prevents it from loading as well.